For months, we’ve been hearing about how European countries are on the verge of bankruptcy…first Greece, then Ireland, Spain, Portugal and even Italy. While it’s not exactly a bailout, cruising is giving Spain a shot in the arm, at least this week.<\/p>\n
Last Saturday, eight cruise ships delivered 31,000 passengers to Barcelona. This weekend, nine cruise ships will deliver 26,000 more, the first time there have ever been nine cruise ships in Barcelona on the same day.<\/p>\n
Any tourists who’ve ever been to Barcelona (that would be us) always want to go back. For cruise tourists, having six or eight hours in the city is likely just to whet the appetite to see a place that is becoming Europe’s cruise capital…ship calls are up 21 from 430 last year, and passengers are up 16%, to 1.3 million.<\/p>\n
Of the eight ships in port last Saturday, seven call Barcelona home. That translates into a lot of flights, taxis and tourism dollars in general for the struggling economy, but it’s not sympathy that draws people to the Catalan capital.<\/p>\n
As our colleague Phil Reimer at Ports and Bows discovered, the historic Las Ramblas district is the heart of the city and it’s walking distance from the port. In Las Ramblas, with its cozy streets and forgotten architecture, you feel like you’ve taken a step back to a time. There’s the inevitable shopping, lots of street musicians providing entertainment and tapas bars in the country that invented them.<\/p>\n
When you’ve been there, it’s one of those places you’re happy to have been…and happier still to see again.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
For months, we’ve been hearing about how European countries are on the verge of bankruptcy…first Greece, then Ireland, Spain, Portugal and even Italy. While it’s not exactly a bailout, cruising is giving Spain a shot in the arm, at least this week. Last Saturday, eight cruise ships delivered 31,000 passengers to Barcelona. This weekend, nine… Continue reading Barcelona's Cruise Ship Bonanza<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,31,36,19,15],"tags":[705,51,86,35,337,372,26,27],"class_list":["post-9270","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cruise-industry-news","category-ports","category-reviews","category-ships","category-stories","tag-barcelona","tag-cruise-ports","tag-cruise-ships","tag-cruises","tag-economic-benefits","tag-economic-impact","tag-phil-reimer","tag-ports-and-bows","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9270","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9270"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9270\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9270"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9270"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vitaluna.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9270"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}