Nice will become the next city to ban cruise ships, with the city’s mayor declaring that cruise ships that exceed 190 metres and a capacity of 900 passengers will be denied access to the city’s port from 1 July 2025.
Mayor Christian Estrosi made the comments on Monday at an event organised by Les Amis du Maire, an association designed to support the work of the town hall.
“Cruises that pollute, that dump their low-cost clientele who consume nothing, but leave their waste behind them, well, I say it: they have no place here,” he said, as reported by Franceinfo.
Subscribe to LATTE Cruise’s free eNewsletter to keep up to date with everything in the luxury cruise space.Contracts have already been signed to ensure only smaller vessels are granted access from July, with the change expected to result in 70% less traffic, according to Estrosi.
“Today we have units that are real floating cities with up to 5,000 passengers . These units do not correspond in any way to the model that we want to develop in terms of hospitality tourism,” he said.
Similar measures are being pondered in nearby Cannes where Mayor David Lisnard has been battling the influx of cruise ships for several years.
In 2019, the city imposed a condition that only cruise ships that limited the sulphur content of their fuel to 0.1% would be granted permission to disembark in the popular French Riviera destination.
The announcement follows Italy’s 2021 decision to ban vessels weighing more than 25,000 tonnes from Venice’s lagoon to prevent the city being placed on UNESCO’s endangered list as a result of overtourism.
