Barcelona has already broken its own annual record for cruise passengers and, on top of that, it has achieved it with a couple of months to go! At least this is what the latest data on the subject provided by the City Council indicate.
In the first ten months of 2023, Barcelona had no less than 3,138,174 tourists of this kind. The previous mark had been set in 2019. At that time, in the twelve months of the year before the pandemic, up to 3,137,978 cruise passengers arrived at the port of the Catalan capital. It is certain that the small difference between these two years is significantly widened with the still pending accounting of passengers from November and December.
Despite the fact that the end and beginning of the year are, traditionally here, the period of least activity in the sector, November and December of last year added more or less 185,000 travelers. In addition, little by little, this industry tends towards deseasonalization.
All this, however, is not the result of an increase in the number of cruise ships docking at the port. In the first ten months of the year, 699 arrived. The record was in 2008, when 784 cruise ships passed through these shores.
The difference between the two major peaks in the historical evolution of Barcelona's cruise operators seems even more considerable if you only take into account the data from the first ten months of 2019, when they were counted up to 2,810,297, around 328,000 less than the same period this year.
In 2022 the number of cruise passengers was still 2,329,474. In addition, if we add the passengers who arrived in Barcelona on regular ferries, all records are being broken this year as well. Also waiting for the data for November and December, we already have 4,710,422 passengers of this mode, while in all of 2019 there were 4,628,622. The decline, the hiatus and the twelve months in which not a single cruise ship disembarked in Barcelona and which led to the outbreak of the pandemic are now definitively behind us.
The truth is that, in this sense and right now, the consequences of the pandemic seem anecdotal. The data provided by the Consistory go back to the mid-1990s, and since then the number of cruise passengers in Barcelona has done nothing but grow. In 1996, up to 278,035 people arrived in the city on these pleasure boats. Then, the number of ferry passengers who passed through here was also much lower than in recent times, just 453,126.
