Barcelona has already broken its own annual record for cruise passengers, and on top of that it does so with a couple of months to spare! At least this is what the latest data on the matter provided by the city council itself indicates.
Because during the first ten months of 2023 Barcelona added no more and no less than 3,138,174 tourists of this type. The previous record had been set in 2019. Then, during the twelve months of the year before the pandemic, up to 3,137,978 cruise passengers called at the port of the Catalan capital. It is certain that the small difference between these two years increases significantly with the still pending accounting of November and December passengers.
Although the end and beginning of the year are traditionally the period of least activity in the sector in these latitudes, the months of November and December of last year added more or less 185,000 travelers. Furthermore, little by little, this industry is trending towards deseasonalization.
All this, however, does not come hand in hand with an increase in the number of cruise ships docking at the port. In the first ten months of the year we added 699. The record in this regard took place in 2008, when 784 cruise ships passed through these coasts.
The difference between the two great points of the historical evolution of Barcelona cruise passengers seems even more considerable if only the data for the first ten months of 2019 are taken into account, when up to 2,810,297 were counted, around 328,000 less than during the same period of this year.
In 2022 the number of cruise passengers was still 2,329,474. Furthermore, if we add the passengers who arrived in Barcelona on regular line ferries, this year all records are also being broken. Also, in the absence of data for November and December, we have already added 4,710,422 passengers of this modality, while throughout 2019 there were 4,628,622. The downturn, the parenthesis and those twelve months in which not a single cruise passenger disembarked in Barcelona that marked the outbreak of the pandemic are now definitively behind us.
The truth is that in this sense and at this point the consequences of the pandemic seem anecdotal. The data provided by the City Council dates back to the mid-90s, and since then the number of cruise passengers in Barcelona has only grown. In 1996, up to 278,035 people arrived in the city on these pleasure boats. So the number of ferry passengers who passed through here was also much lower than in recent times, just 453,126.
