Cartagena to be flooded with cruise passengers this Thursday

Three liners with 9,000 tourists on board are due to stop over in the city’s port

The cruise liner season for Cartagena will hit its peak this Thursday July 17 with the arrival of three liners bringing almost 9,000 tourists.

July is a busy month anyway as a total of 14 liners will dock in the city, carrying approximately 29,000 passengers, who will be keen to discover what Cartagena has to offer, even if they only have a few hours to see the sights.

The first ship to arrive on Thursday will be the Crown Princess, owned by the US corporation Princess Cruises, at 7am with 3,674 passengers on board.

This will be joined at 8am by the P&O liner Arcadia with another 2,458 people, and finally at 10am, the AIDAstella owned by Aida Cruises will bring 2,700 more travellers.

The city’s hospitality and retail sectors will be hoping to pick up a vital bit of extra income from this “tsunami” of 8,832 tourists, breaking Cartagena’s record for a single day.

So far this month the Silver Ray and the Azamara Pursuit have already stopped over, albeit with a total of only just over 2,500 tourists between them, and the British operator Saga Cruises brought another 1,000 visitors the following day.

And on the 9th, two liners stopped simultaneously in Cartagena, the Seabourn Ovation and the imposing AIDAcosma with over 6,000 passengers on board.

These figures prove how popular the city has become with tourist businesses as a port of call.

Moreover, the bookings for the second half of this year are equally exciting for the sector, with a total of 118 ships due to bring over 182,000 passengers.

These will be in addition to the 72 liners with more than 87,000 passengers who have already visited Cartagena during the first half of this year.

All this means that 2025 is expected to rack up a total of 190 stopovers and over a quarter of a million passengers, including 16 liners and 3 cruise companies coming to the city for the first time. It will be a record year for cruise tourism in Cartagena.

There will be 30 days on which two ships visit the city at once, 10 on which there will be three, several with four and one with no less than five.

While cruise tourism is apparently good for the local economy (although this is debatable), a 2022 study found that cruise ships are one of the biggest contributors to climate change in all of Europe.

Image: Ayuntamiento de Cartagena