 | The Maritime Station of Vigo
Council: Vigo Localization: Muelle de Trasatlánticos The Maritime Station of Vigo is the doorway for tourists that arrive to the city via the sea. The place was during centuries mainly a port of exit for hundreds of thousands of Galicians, towards their emigration to America. The supremacy of air travel as against sea travel gradually took over in the 1960s and the 1970s. There were still cabotage and communication lines operating with the Canary Islands and England during the 1970s. All such lines disappeared after the 1980s, except for merchant vessels that also transported passengers. The last mixed passenger-cargo line in regular service that had a stopover at Vigo, was the line between Saint Helena, Tristan da Cunha, South Africa and Southampton, which closed at the start of the present century. The number of passengers disembarked today is quite high but all of these arrive on huge vessels, such as the Queen Mary 2, the Queen Elizabeth 2, the Venture, and big passenger ships in general, all of which are holiday and pleasure cruise liners, except the Queen Mary 2, which continues to be a transatlantic liner, that is, it regularly crosses the ocean between Southampton and New York, sometimes making a stopover at Vigo. In fact, Vigo was the first stop on the inaugural voyage of this ship.It is a jetty for cruise liners that have Vigo as stopover point amongst their tourist route stopovers. It has a maritime station, a building with more than 5,000 square metres of area, which shares its maritime use with others of a cultural nature. |