Last Friday, the massive container ship Barcelona Maersk made its maiden call at the Port of Barcelona. Launched and christened in Ulsan, South Korea, in February, it was not until November – after ten months plying various shipping routes – that the vessel’s inaugural call was scheduled at its namesake city.
Sporting its owner’s signature blue hull, the ship measures 350 metres in length with a carrying capacity of 17,480 TEUs (standard twenty-foot equivalent containers). It belongs to a series of half a dozen cutting-edge, next-generation large container ships fitted with dual-fuel engines ready to operate on green methanol. According to the Port Authority, this fuel technology slashes greenhouse gas emissions by up to 90%. For vessels of this scale, that equates to a reduction of around 280 tonnes of CO₂ per day.
Scheduling the ship’s call in our city before year-end became feasible after it was deployed on one of Maersk’s liner services linking Europe and Southeast Asia. After completing loading and discharge operations at the APMT Barcelona terminal, the vessel set sail for Genoa, Italy, from where it will transit the Suez Canal to return to Asia over the coming days.
On board the vessel, Port of Barcelona President José Alberto Carbonell presented Tomasz Kostecki, captain of the second Maersk ship to bear the name of Barcelona, with a commemorative plaque marking the inaugural call. Such tokens traditionally hang in a place of honour near the bridge aboard ships formally welcomed by port authorities. Also attending the welcome ceremony were Jordi Valls, Fourth Deputy Mayor of Barcelona City Council, alongside senior executives from the Port Authority and APM Terminals – a subsidiary of the Maersk group, the world’s second-largest ocean carrier.
Speaking at the event, Carbonell emphasised that city and carrier share a common drive towards increasingly sustainable maritime transport – an argument heard routinely at public engagements with port executives, as sustainability has become an enduring guiding principle backed by continuous initiatives.
A sizable family
As noted, the Barcelona Maersk joined the Maersk fleet earlier this year. The Danish shipowner operates a fleet of around 750 container vessels, representing roughly 14% of the global container shipping market.
Moreover, this specific unit joins a broader family than one might expect. Fifteen other merchant vessels feature Barcelona in their names, several of which are also container carriers, such as the Barcelona Express, the MSC Barcelona, and the ZIM Barcelona. The registry also includes crude oil tankers, chemical carriers, gas carriers, bulkers, and car carriers. In addition, an Asian fishing vessel sports the exotic name of Barcelona across its hull, alongside a fair number of sailing yachts, powerboats, and even a Russian river cruiser named in homage to the city.
Furthermore, two Ro-Pax ferries are familiar regulars in the port. Grimaldi Lines’ Cruise Barcelona is one of two sister ships linking Barcelona with Civitavecchia, the commercial port of Rome, via Sardinia. As a point of trivia, in addition to high passenger numbers, cars, and freight lorries, the fuselages of all ATR turboprop aircraft assembled in Toulouse arrive in France via Barcelona aboard the vehicle decks of this ship and the Cruise Roma, as the aircraft cell (the plane without wings) is built in Italy.
Trasmed-Grimaldi’s Ciudad de Barcelona calls in the city almost daily on its scheduled routes to the Balearic Islands. Its back-story carries added heritage value: formerly christened the Volcán del Teide, its addition to the Trasmed fleet under its current name in 2022 revived a 40-year-old Trasmediterránea tradition. With the arrival of the Second Republic in 1931, the shipping company founded in 1917 replaced monarchical names across its fleet with city names – a practice that endured for decades. During that period, two vessels were christened Ciudad de Barcelona.
The first was the former Infante Don Jaime, which sailed under the new name from 1931 until 1937, when it was torpedoed and sunk by a Nationalist submarine during the Spanish Civil War. The second Ciudad de Barcelona sailed across Trasmediterránea’s entire network between 1955 and 1982. It was only forty years later that the Grimaldi subsidiary, having acquired Trasmediterránea’s Balearic operations, restored the storied name.
Nearly a century later, the city’s name continues to navigate the seas aboard vessels of every stripe – among them the latest arrival, the Barcelona Maersk, which finally met 'its port' last weekend.