Obviously, they’ve been reading 6000 miles…, and have decided that action is required.
Ostensibly, this is – as you can see – a plan to fight the city’s overtourism problem. And we’ve heard a lot about the clashes between tourists and locals recently. Must be equally nice and awful to have that sort of problem. But I’m not sure that Barcelona needs the money quite as much as Cape Town does. So shutting down two of your seven!!!!! cruise terminals might be a viable option to cut tourist numbers to some degree.
But then look down at that last paragraph: green power supplied to cruise ships while they are berthed. And while that doesn’t remove the tourists (the two closing cruise terminals do that) or the visual distractions, it might at least reduce the amount of pollution that these ships add to the ports in which they are staying.
Perhaps, since Cape Town is seemingly (and reasonably) anxious to grow our local cruise ship business, we should be looking at providing a similar green energy policy and hook-ups for the cruise ships visiting the Mother City? We have wind, we have sunshine, and we could place something right down in the port area without the need for extensive infrastructure like power lines.
Given how much money the cruise ships bring into the city, surely some it invested in making them a greener way of accessing Cape Town – and protecting the health of the local population – would be no bad thing.