The seven lives of Europe's fastest-growing port

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acques-Yves Cousteau, a French naval officer, achieved worldwide fame in his civilian life as an explorer and researcher of the underwater world. A born charmer, he knew how to win over producers, sponsors, and viewers of his cinematographic reports and television documentaries. In his international conferences, which served both to enhance his adventurer-chic aura and to attract aid for his oceanographic foundations, he repeated some ideas that made his audience think. "Our planet should not have been called earth, but planet water," Cousteau would say solemnly, while showing a world map or an image of the earth from space.

Cousteau was a nature lover and was fascinated by all the potential hidden beneath oceans and seas. He always pondered how little was known about something so close. Precisely and in direct relation to the sea, in Barcelona there is something as close as it is generally little known: the port, an enormous economic locomotive that is permanently in motion and about which little is known if one is not directly involved with its day-to-day. Always present, although its scope, its real weight in the city, in the economy of the great metropolis, and, in general, the enormous influence that all its activity has for Barcelona, are unknown.

The port lives seven parallel lives. Some are more known and others more discreet. Some are integrated into the city and others are so far away that it could practically be said that they are conveniently hidden from unnecessary glances.

1. The best known by the inhabitants and visitors of the city is that of leisure and sports: in addition to accessible docks with leisure offerings in the Port Vell area such as Moll de la Fusta, Moll d'Espanya or Barceloneta, there are two historic sports clubs in the area: the Náutico and the Marítim, in eternal and healthy competition for 116 years. The second had, from 1913 to 1959, one of the most beautiful buildings in the port, the clubhouse built by the architect Enric Sagnier, which had to be demolished due to the growth and commercial needs of the port. It also currently includes the moorings and pontoons of One Ocean Port Vell, a marina specialized in large lengths, which has brought significant economic activity around these yachts (repair, maintenance, suppliers, training) and an exclusive club-restaurant for members and visitors. The offer of leisure moorings within the port will be completed with the imminent opening of Marina Vela, next to the north entrance and at the foot of the iconic W Hotel, which since its opening has been part of the city's skyline in photographs, drawings and logos.

2. The second life of the port mixes tourism, hedonism and travel: Barcelona is one of the world capitals of cruises, something demonstrated by the 2.7 million travelers who passed through the city aboard tourist ships, generators of employment and economic drivers around each stopover. These ship visits, which in 2018 will exceed 870, have a particularity: a high percentage of cruise passengers begin or end their journey in Barcelona, something that has been directly related to the growth of the airport in terms of users and destinations, as an air-sea "win-win": many new routes, especially intercontinental ones, have been consolidated thanks to travelers from all over the world who arrive or depart by plane to their countries starting or ending their boat trips from Barcelona. In the same waters where cruises arrive, there is another smaller tourism, but one that also looks at the sea with excited eyes: that of the boats that, departing from the stairs of Portal de la Pau, in front of Columbus, offer the possibility of comfortably seeing the entire city coastline from the sea or touring the port, in the case of the historic Golondrinas.
3. With these boats, in classic, wooden versions or by means of fiberglass catamarans, even more lives of the port can be known, such as the third: that of the ferries, which connect Barcelona with five different ports in the Balearic Islands and whose daily service is fundamental for the life of Mallorca, Ibiza and Menorca. Tons of products that supply them, from the most basic to the most improbable, are transported in their holds every night. In addition to this fundamental Barcelona-Balearic bridge, ferry services to different ports in Morocco, Algeria and Italy are also operated in the port. In 2017 alone, 1.4 million passengers chose this means of transport to reach their destination.
4. The fourth life is energy, focused on large deposits and pontoons located south of the facility, next to the Zona Franca and separated from a good part of the city by Montjuic mountain. In that area, precisely called the energy dock (it was decided to change the previous one baptized as "flammables" for logical reasons) is where ships of all sizes permanently load and unload natural gas, gasoline and chemical products. In all three cases, in 2017 the movements of these in Barcelona increased between 23 and 64%. For security reasons, these areas are the most remote and restricted in the port.
5. Very close, comes the fifth life of the port of Barcelona: that of vehicle transport: either on the aforementioned ferries or on enormous garage ships that travel the world transporting all kinds of mechanical traction vehicles from their place of manufacture to the places where they will end up being sold and circulating. In 2018, 837,273 units were counted, adding export, import or in transit transported from one port to another, a figure that despite having suffered a setback in 2017 (it has been the only one of all the items counted in the statistics), is simply spectacular, as is seeing part of all those vehicles aligned in the facilities, ready to board the ships or freshly disembarked.
6. The sixth life of the port of Barcelona is bulk transport: that which arrives or is loaded directly into the holds of ships that in English are called bulk carriers, which means bulk carriers or bulk cargo in Spanish. These products include cement for construction, potash, used for fertilizers, food supplements for livestock and different industrial processes and which arrives directly at the docks via rail or scrap metal, apparently useless when disembarked, although in a few days it becomes steel in facilities near the port following the course of the Llobregat. Also very important are other goods that arrive or leave in bulk from the port using enormous silos and deposits: edible oils, soybeans or cereals and their flours.

7. We come to the seventh life of the port, one of the most strongly beating: that of containers. Since their creation in the United States in the mid-1950s, these large rectangular metal boxes, marketed in two sizes that always fit, have revolutionized the sector by being able to be used for intermodal transport by rail, road or sea without having to move the merchandise from that space. Barcelona is the origin, destination and also an exchange port for these containers. Calculated one by one, exactly 2,968,757 were moved last year in the port, with a positive balance compared to export containers, which are transported in increasingly larger ships and whose regular lines connect Barcelona with the world and vice versa.