It had been seven years in the making. On Thursday the resolution was voted in the Amsterdam City Hall and won the yes. A yes to prohibiting passenger boats from mooring in the heart of the city. Cruise ships are no longer officially welcome in the capital of the Netherlands.
Since 2018, the municipal corporation is run by a tripartite made up of the D66 Liberals, the Social Democrats of the Labor Party and the Greens of GroenLinks. The city’s first female mayor, Femke Halsema, a filmmaker, documentarian and politician, is from this last party. She and her government team have conspired in recent years to turn around the international perception of the city and curb tourism that they consider runaway. In addition to the campaign to prevent unwanted bachelor parties, especially for the British, the persecution of cannabis consumption outside limited spaces has been added and work is being done on a comprehensive reform of the red light district, known for its wide sexual offer.
Cruise ships have also entered into the project of changing the face of Amsterdam, a city of just over 900,000 inhabitants that receives nearly 21 million tourists each year. Of these, some 300,000 arrive on passenger ships. It is a relatively low proportion compared to the total, although the City Council has put them on target. “Polluting cruise ships do not mesh with our city’s sustainable goals,” Ilana Rooderkerk, the city’s D66 leader, said after Thursday’s vote. The councilor recognized that what happened in Venice has been inspiring for them.
In the summer of 2021, a ban on the transit of ships of more than 25,000 tons through the Giudecca canal, in the center of Venice, came into force, after years of protests by local groups and the recommendation of Unesco, which clamored for the protection of the city. Now, the trips that make a stopover in the Veneto capital dock at the docks in the industrial area of ??Marghera, far from the historic center or have changed their stops to Trieste.
The mayor of Marseille, another large European cruise port, also says he is working to reduce the pressure of this industry in his city and similar moves are being considered in Dubrovnik (Croatia) and the Greek island of Santorini. The Croatian port will receive more than half a million cruise passengers this year and this season the Greek destination accumulates four or five mega-cruises several days a week, something that the locals, even living off tourism, consider unacceptable because it totally distorts the essence of the place.
The vote in the Amsterdam City Hall does not imply that cruise ships will imminently disappear. At the moment, 57 stopovers are still scheduled at the passenger terminal until the end of the year and there are a hundred scheduled for 2024, although by then they could already be contemplating other docks for mooring far from the city center. This port strategy is in line with the airport strategy. The managers of Amsterdam-Schiphol are taking the foot off the growth accelerator, going from 500,000 flights a year to 460,000 this year, to reduce them to 440,000 in 2024, limiting the activity of private jets to the extreme.
Meanwhile, the Cruise Lines International Association (CLIA) has indicated that work was already underway on the electrification of docks to avoid gas emissions during ship stopovers and it remains to be seen where passenger operations will be relocated around Amsterdam, where, they indicate, cruise tourism contributes around 105 million euros a year to the city.
