The Arrecife City Council is presenting this week at the Seatrade Europe international fair, which takes place in Hamburg, the advantages and attractions of Lanzarote as a base island for tourist cruises.
This fair, the largest in Europe, brings together shipping companies specializing in cruise tourism, port authorities, cruise stations and public institutions where their ports have strategic positions in the tourist cruise market, which is experiencing a significant boom.
The mayor of Arrecife, Yonathan de León, and the PP spokesperson and Councilor for Tourism and Commerce, Eli Merino, held a working meeting on Wednesday morning, the opening day of this fair, with Fabian Nissen, Manager Port Operations, of the Carnival Cruises shipping company, among the most important in the world.
The objective of the Arrecife authorities, with this meeting, is to ensure that in the medium and long term the shipping companies belonging to the Carnival holding company designate the port of Arrecife and the island of Lanzarote as a base port for their transatlantic ships that already carry out tourist circuits through the North Atlantic, including the Canary Islands.
Carnival owns the shipping companies Aída, Costa and P&O, which stand out among the cruise companies that transport the most passengers to the Canary Islands.
In this working meeting, the mayor of Arrecife and the Councilor for Tourism were accompanied by executives from Global Ports, the company that has the administrative concession for the two cruise terminals of Los Mármoles and Naos, which opened this 2025 in the city of Arrecife.
Arrecife "leads" cruise stopovers in the new season
Mayor Yonathan de León, who is the only public official from Lanzarote on the board of the Las Palmas Port Authority, has detailed that the stopover requests for Arrecife until May 2026 reflect, according to APLP data, that the capital of Lanzarote will receive 352 cruises, with an increase of 18 percent compared to the same season of 2024/2025.
Precisely, this coming Sunday the 14th, Arrecife will premiere the new autumn and winter cruise season with the stopover of the British cruise ship Ventura, with more than 2,000 passengers traveling from the south of England.
Eli Merino has emphasized that "Arrecife's attendance during last autumn at the WTV Fair in London allowed us to close agreements with shipping companies for Arrecife to be a base port, as confirmed for the end of this year, 2026 and 2027, by the Italian-Swiss shipping company MSC Cruises".
The Councilor for Tourism of Arrecife remarks that "being a base port allows for much more income to be generated by tourists traveling on cruises".
During this fair in Hamburg, the mayor Yonathan de León and the Councilor for Tourism, Eli Merino, learned about the forecasts handled by Puertos del Estado, to which Arrecife is attached, in the cruise business, as announced at the stand that Puertos del Estado has at the Hamburg fair, a tourist event that is held every two years. After the 2023 meeting, cruise tourism figures in the European area are growing by more than two digits, after the COVID pandemic.
The Arrecife authorities have been able to close new collaboration and support agreements for the Arrecife Cruise Terminal, in a meeting held today in Hamburg with Francesc Grau, regional director of Global Ports, Dan García, director of operations of Global Ports in the Canary Islands, and with Susana Gutiérrez, director of the Cruise Terminals in the eastern ports of the Canary Islands, including Arrecife.
