The Traveller's Magazine
A new offshore cruise ship terminal could be the answer Venice has been looking for to stop cruise ships from invading and ploughing through Venice’s Grand Canal.
The city of Venice is looking at new plans to reduce the impact of giant cruise ships that enter the lagoon on a daily basis. The latest proposal is to build a £100m artificial terminal island in the Adriatic. Cruise ship passengers would disembark on to man-made jetty and board a fleet of catamarans what would ferry them into Venice.
Each catamaran would seat 800 passengers and shuttle them to Venice’s historic city centre in less than an hour. Passengers would still be able to experience the thrill of entering the lagoon by boat but would also satisfy the local’s complains that the mammoth cruise liners are an eyesore and are “dwarfing the city’s bell towers and palazzi.”
We don’t even need to mention the pollution that cruise ships bring with them, which is speeding up the process of erosion of the city’s precious and fragile foundations as they pass as close as a few hundred metres of St. Mark’s Square.
