Cruise tourism in Barcelona: from marginality to international leadership

Today Barcelona is the leading European cruise port and is ranked as the fifth destination of this kind worldwide. The prospects are for this product to sustain or even step up its growth throughout 2011. However, this considerable development is relatively recent, even though cruise ships have been arriving in the city for many years. This article analyses the success of cruise tourism in the city of Barcelona in the past three decades. The academic literature on cruise tourism is still quite scant, especially literature on Barcelona, even though cruise tourism is one of the most important tourism phenomena in this destination in recent years. In this literature, one can note the almost complete predominance of references on the Caribbean, the traditional destination of the U.S. cruise market. However, it is important to note the scarcity of studies on the Mediterranean, which can partly be explained by the fact that its growth is fairly recent and its importance in relation to other destinations is still incipient. Within this dynamic, as the leading home port in the region, Barcelona is a clear example of the explosion of cruise tourism in the past two decades.