The Muelle Barcelona Norte and World Trade Centre docks will no longer allow cruise ships to dock from October 22,, impacting passengers who will now need to take a 30-minute shuttle bus to reach the city centre.
Barcelona is reducing the number of cruise ships allowed to dock at its ports, lowering the limit from ten to seven. These measures are a result of the Cruise Sustainability Council’s efforts since 2018 to regulate cruise tourism and mitigate its impact.
In 2019 Barcelona’s Mayor Ada Colau promised to restrict the number of cruise ships in the city, while some local politicians have compared the influx of cruise tourists to a “plague of locusts”. “There are thousands of people who arrive at once,” Colau said for El Pais. “Most of them stay for just a few hours and are highly concentrated in the downtown area. They generate a feeling of collapse.”
