Five cruise ships are scheduled for August 12 at the Port of La Coruña, which will occupy five different urban docks, according to the port’s calendar. In one of them, Centenario Sur, the docking of this type of vessel is unusual. There, the Borealis, arriving from Southampton with 1,400 passengers, will shut down its engines. In last year’s five-ship call, one of the vessels stopped at Centenario Oeste.
The cruise ships Celebrity Apex and Queen Anne have the largest passenger counts, with 3,200 and 3,000 tourists respectively. They will dock at Trasatlánticos and San Diego and will then set sail bound for Bilbao and Gijón. The Celebrity Equinox will also head to the Basque port after resting at the Trasatlánticos dock with a capacity for 2,852 people. The smallest, MSC Explora III, with a maximum of 922 passengers, will have its docking point at Calvo Sotelo Sur.
If the ocean liners dock at full occupancy at the docks of the Port of La Coruña on Wednesday, August 12, the day of the total solar eclipse in over a century, more than 11,300 cruise passengers would arrive in the city, a good part of whom would stroll through its streets. That is the forecast for the five-ship cruise call that the inner port of La Coruña will record on that date.
The city will be filled with tourists for three consecutive days, as another three ships will bring over 9 thousand passengers on Tuesday, August 11, and another will dock with almost 4,400 on Thursday, August 13.
The last time five cruise ships arrived in La Coruña on the same day was on April 22, 2025, when the record for visitors in a single day was broken with around 15,000 people. The port estimated at that time that the call would generate an economic impact of USD 1,180,000 in the city.
That was not the largest call in terms of number of recreational vessels, since on May 2, 2014, up to six cruise ships had touched the docks of La Coruña, although of smaller dimensions and with fewer passengers.
The coincidence of five vessels at the city’s docks forces the activation of a special operation to reinforce the necessary activity to attend to the ships and their passengers.
The Port Authority of La Coruña is currently working with all its agents to finalize every operational detail that will be put into practice both on the day of the eclipse and before and after, which it will announce very soon. It could happen that some of the ships remain docked in the city during the moments when the sun is hidden, although other passengers could witness the meteorological phenomenon already at sea.
