On Sunday, August 7, at 19.00 at the Riga Passenger Port (MK 4 berth at the Vanšu Bridge), the solemn ceremony with the participation of the management of the Freeport of Riga and Riga City Council will take place, says press center of Freeport of Riga Authority. The officials will welcome the 10,000,000th passenger having arrived at the Port of Riga since the establishment of the Freeport of Riga in 2000. It is planned that the passenger will arrive at Riga with 1,530 other passengers on board the COSTA FASCINOSA of the Italian cruise company Costa Cruises.
Since 2000, about 8,200 passenger ship calls have been registered in the port of Riga, the majority of them - about 6,600 - were the regular passenger liners’ calls, while 1,600 of them were cruise ships’ calls. 88% (~8.8 million) of all guests arriving by sea were ferry passengers, while 12% (~1.2 million) were cruise passengers from a total of more than 124 countries.
During these years, more than 200 different cruise ships have visited Riga. The leader in terms of registered calls is the cruise ship VIKING CINDERELLA, which called the port 73 times between 2004 and 2013, with a total of 120 thousand passengers visiting Riga.
VOYAGER OF THE SEAS, which visited Riga for the first time this year, was the largest cruise ship in terms of GT or the total capacity of the vessel (138194 GT, 311 m), while the largest ship in terms of length was CELEBRITY SILHOUETTE (319 m), which visited Riga in 2017. COSTA PACIFICA is the leader in terms of the number of passengers carried at one time with 3523 passengers on board; the ship has called the port of Riga 37 times since 2011, carrying 115.7 thousand passengers.
A record number of cruise ship calls - more than 100 - is expected in the port of Riga during 2022 cruise season, which will exceed the results of the last completed 2019 cruise season by a quarter. Of these vessels, 13 ships are visiting us for the first time this season, and around 20 cruise ships have stayed or will stay in Riga for more than one day.
In July of this year, a monthly record in terms of received ships was also registered in the history of the port of Riga - 30 cruise ships were welcomed and served in the port within one month. For 7 months, a total of 63 cruise ship calls have already been registered, and 42.88 thousand passengers visited Riga. They came mostly from Germany (18.4 thousand), USA (9.7 thousand), Great Britain (2.7 thousand), Sweden (1.5 thousand) and Canada (1 thousand).