Full steam ahead for the cruise season in Palma . The concentration of up to five cruise ships at the same time on Monday in the port has set alarm bells ringing during a May bank holiday weekend. Is the agreement limiting the arrival of cruise ships from 2022 being fulfilled? Is it enough to renew this agreement or does it need to be revised? The regional government has already begun negotiations. In the last week, 23 cruise ships have docked in Palma, four of which were mega-cruise ships with the capacity to for more than 5,000 passengers. This is 21.05% more than in the same period in 2024, which has set off all the alarms bells ringing.
Conservation organisations such as the Platform Against Mega-Cruise Ships and the environmental group GOB have been fighting against mass tourism in the Balearics for years. Menys Turisme Més Vida (Less Tourism, More Life) is the latest to join their demands. They are fighting against cruise ships not only because of the congestion they cause in the Balearic capital, but also because of their environmental impact due to their emissions and their energy and water consumption.
The cruise season in Palma has only just begun. If the forecasts of the Balearic Port Authority are correct, this May up to 65 cruise ships will dock in city, 4.84% more than in the same month last year. In 2021, the Balearic Government reached an agreement with shipping agents limiting stopovers from 2022 onwards. According to the document regulating this agreement, only one mega-cruise ship and two smaller vessels may be in Palma at the same time. Why, then, were there five ships full of cruise passengers in the Balearic capital on both 29 April and 2 May? The framework agreement has small print. Although it establishes a weekly limit of 8,500 cruise passengers per day, ships with fewer than 500 seats do not count towards the limit.
Seven of the ships that docked in the city last week had a capacity for 500 passengers. Four had more than 5,000 and eleven have between 501 and 4,999 passengers, according to data from the Balearic Port Authority. The largest to arrive was the Marella Explorer 2, with a capacity for 6,780 people, and the smallest was the Emerald Sakara, with a capacity for 100. Both the regional government and the association for cruise companies assure that they are complying scrupulously with the agreement.
The cruise ships that have docked in Palma in the last seven days had a capacity for 58,255 passengers. If we divide this figure by seven days, we get an average of 8,322 passengers, 178 people below the maximum limit. The truth is that the APB does not have a real-time count of the number of cruise passengers arriving at the port, so, in the absence of occupancy data from the shipping agents, the figures we have refer to the total passenger capacity of the ships.
If the APB’s forecasts for 2025 are met, cruise arrivals in Palma will grow by 4.84% this year. Between January and December 2025, 551 ships will arrive with a capacity for more than 1.8 million passengers. This is 47 ships and 41,085 cruise passengers more than in 2024. Although the number of stopovers is increasing exponentially, the truth is that pre-pandemic levels have not yet been recovered. The all-time high was recorded in 2019 when 592 cruise ships arrived in Palma.
It was then that the Platform against Megacruise Ships was created, calling for a limit on ships with more than 5,000 passengers. Two years later, the regional government announced what is considered a historic agreement, which came into force in January 2022 and is valid for five years, expiring in 2027. Given that companies plan their routes one to two years in advance, the document limiting cruise ships should be renewed shortly to prevent it from lapsing.
The Regional Minister for Tourism, Jaume Bauzà, recently stated that his intention is to renew the framework agreement before it expires, incorporating new sustainability and efficiency requirements. He argues that the agreement is currently being complied with. However, conservation groups accuse shipping companies of failing to comply with the current agreement and are calling for Palma to follow the model of Venice, which since August 2021 has banned ships over 180 metres in length and over 25,000 tonnes from sailing in its waters.