Jaume Collboni wants Barcelona to stop receiving large cruise ships. The mayor announced it in an institutional interview, in which he also advanced that the City Council plans to increase the tourist tax for short-stay passengers by three euros in 2027, to place it at 14 euros per person.
The tension of the municipal plan is that the city council plans to make the arrival of these visitors more expensive while setting their disappearance as a goal. Collboni maintained that these types of cruises "make intensive use of public space and do not generate income," and defended that the surcharge must serve to cover the cost of the services they consume in the city.
Collboni set Barcelona the goal of bringing cruise ship arrivals to zero
The mayor explicitly set that goal when referring to the tourism model linked to the port of Barcelona. "The objective is to reduce them to zero," stated Jaume Collboni in the interview.
"The goal is to reduce them to zero" - Jaume Collboni, mayor of Barcelona
In the same intervention, Collboni differentiated short-stay cruise passengers from other visitors and justified a higher tax treatment for that segment. His argument is that the city assumes a pressure on public space that it does not then compensate with sufficient economic return.
"They make intensive use of public space and do not generate income" - Jaume Collboni, mayor of Barcelona
Municipal surcharge would raise the fee to 14 euros by 2027
For 2027, the City Council plans to increase the tourist tax by three euros for short-stay cruise passengers. If the plan prospers, the total amount will reach 14 euros per person.
Collboni has also opened conversations with the Generalitat de Catalunya to try to raise that tax even further in the coming years. That additional margin is not closed and depends on the regulatory capacity that both administrations agree upon.
Regarding the destination of the revenue, the mayor specified that the extraordinary money must cover expenses linked to the passage of these visitors through Barcelona. "Finance the resources that cruise passengers consume in the city," he stated when explaining the purpose of the increase.
The municipal plenary and the Generalitat must validate the increase beforehand
Before applying the surcharge, the municipal government needs to pass an agreement in the City Council plenary to update the fiscal ordinances. Afterwards, the measure will still need to receive the approval of the Generalitat de Catalunya.
That double process conditions the calendar of a proposal that the city council places in 2027. The specific forecast of the municipal plan involves raising the total amount to 14 euros per person for short-stay cruise passengers.