harbours

The President of the Port of Barcelona, ??Sixte Cambra, said on Wednesday that the total container traffic had reached around one million TEUs for the full year (the reference unit for cargo ships, equivalent to 20 feet containers). “This is the record number of the best pre-crisis times, which happened in 2007” stated Cambra during an informational breakfast in Madrid. The President of the Port of Barcelona also underlined the change in trends since in 2007, in spite of the record number of containers, “more than 60% were imports; in 2013 over 60% were exported containers.”

35 companies united with public institutions formed a Boating Industry Cluster to make Barcelona an international leader in the sector. The cluster will help achieve higher levels of productivity and competitiveness. It builds on Barcelona’s deep tradition as a maritime city. In fact, Barcelona hosts the most important trade fair in the boating industry in Europe and it is the world’s 4^th largest port for cruise ships. Furthermore, more than 1,000 companies related to this sector are based in Catalonia, as well as prestigious university schools. This initiative follows Barcelona’s strategy to identify specific business sectors and create clusters to strengthen them, as it has previously done with sectors such as biomedicine, automation and mobile technologies.

East Asian and South Mediterranean countries are the two regions with the largest cargo exchange at Barcelona Port. In total, 538,700 TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) passed through Barcelona during the first quarter of 2011.

Barcelona and València’s Chambers of Commerce have quantified the economic net benefit that building the Mediterranean railway corridor would represent, not speaking of the political, social and cultural consequences. The Mediterranean railway, going from Gibraltar to France going along the Mediterranean shore, should be a EU priority.