One of Europe’s most popular tourist spots is aiming to reduce the number of cruise ships able to dock in an attempt to limit the number of tourists in their already crowded city. 

The city’s mayor said he wanted to negotiate with the city’s port authorities to reach a new agreement which would reduce the number of terminals where cruise ships could arrive. 

Last year, 803 cruise ships docked in Barcelona, carrying 3.5 million passengers. This figure is a rise of 13.7 percent compared with pre-pandemic figures in 2019. Of these visitors, 46 percent – 1.6 million – only spent one day in the city before returning to the ship. 

Until April this year, the number of cruise tourists has risen by eight percent compared with the same period last year, the city council said. 

“Barcelona is the fourth most important cruise port in the world. We want to propose a new agreement with the port about the number of terminals,” Jordi Valls, head of tourism for Barcelona city council, told El País newspaper. “Each year the number of cruise tourists rises about 9 per cent and that is not acceptable for the city.”

Every time a ship docks, on average 3,000 people then descend on the already crowded city, which has a population of only 1.6 million in a space only 39 square miles – six times smaller than London. Adding insult to injury, the cruise industry argues that each passenger contributes an average of £78 per day to the local economy.

“If we exceed the capacity that Barcelona can support,” added Valls, “what the visitors contribute no longer has value.”

Currently, two new cruise terminals are being planned, adding to the five already operational. The city’s mayor, Jaume Collboni, said he instead wanted to see this reduced. 

Didac Navarro, of the Stop Cruises campaign group, said if nothing was done then Barcelona would soon receive 5 million cruise tourists each year.

“The roads and pavements in the centre of the city and near the Sagrada Familia are already saturated with cruise tourists and this model is unsustainable,” he told i. He applauded the council’s move to limit the number of ships, something, he said, they had been asking for “from the start”. 

In October, Barcelona announced it would restrict access of cruise liners to its congested city centre in an attempt to combat over-tourism. Most arrivals at the Mediterranean port will now have to dock away from the World Trade Center pier, which is just a short walk from La Rambla Boulevard, the busiest street in the city.

The move comes as protests take place against over-tourism, which has been pricing out locals from towns and cities across Spain. About 10,000 people protested in the Balearic Island of Palma de Mallorca on Saturday, Spanish police said, with smaller protests in Menorca and Ibiza.

Barcelona is the next to follow in the footsteps of other European cities in limiting cruise ships. In 2021, Venice banned cruise ships from its centre and Palma in Mallorca cut the number of ships arriving to three per day until 2026 with only one being allowed to carry more than 5,000 passengers.