Aboard Map

What to do at each cruise port

A page for every port I've written up, with what costs nothing and is walkable from the ship kept apart from what costs money. They're grouped below by where the ships go: the Norwegian fjords, Spain, Portugal and the Canaries, northern Europe and the Caribbean.

Norwegian fjord ports

• AlesundThe whole town burned down in one night in January 1904 and was rebuilt at speed in Art Nouveau, with materials Kaiser Wilhelm II sent by ship.
• FlamA hamlet at the end of Aurlandsfjord with a railway out of all proportion to it.
• HaugesundNorway calls this its birthplace: Harald Fairhair, who pulled the country into one kingdom in the 870s, had his seat at Avaldsnes, just down the coast.
• HellesyltA waterfall runs straight through the middle of the village and into the fjord.
• KristiansandLaid out as a grid in 1641 by Christian IV of Denmark-Norway, who wanted a fortress town guarding the entrance to the Skagerrak and had one built on the sand at the river mouth.
• OldenA village of a few hundred people at the head of Nordfjord, 100 km in from the open sea.
• SkjoldenThe innermost point of the Sognefjord, about 200 kilometres from open water.
• StavangerA herring and sardine-canning town that struck North Sea oil in 1969 and became Norway's richest city.

Spain, Portugal and the Canaries

• AlicanteSanta Barbara castle stands on the bare rock of Benacantil straight above the town, held in turn by Carthaginians, Romans and Moors because whoever had the rock had the harbour.
• Arrecife de LanzaroteBetween 1730 and 1736 the ground opened and buried a quarter of the island under lava; the Timanfaya field is still hot enough a metre down to cook on.
• BarcelonaThe Gothic Quarter is built on the Roman town of Barcino, and the Sagrada Familia has been under construction since 1882: Gaudi knew he wouldn't see it finished and said his client was in no hurry.
• Cadiz (tours to Seville)Probably the oldest continuously lived-in city in western Europe: the Phoenicians founded Gadir here around 1100 BC.
• FuerteventuraThe oldest of the Canaries and the flattest, a hundred kilometres off Africa and made mostly of wind, sand and goats.
• Getxo (tours to Bilbao)Basque country, at the mouth of the river up to Bilbao.
• Gran CanariaColumbus put in at Las Palmas in 1492 to mend a rudder on his way west, and the house he is said to have stayed in is now a museum about him.
• IbizaFounded by Carthage in 654 BC, and a World Heritage site for the Renaissance walls of Dalt Vila and the Phoenician village at Sa Caleta rather than for anything that happened after 1987.
• La CorunaThe Spanish Armada sailed from this harbour in 1588, and it's still guarded by the Tower of Hercules, a Roman lighthouse from about the year 100 which has never stopped working: the oldest one on earth still doing its job.
• LisbonOn All Saints' Day 1755 an earthquake, then a tsunami up the Tagus, then three days of fire destroyed most of the city and shook Europe's confidence in a benign universe.
• MadeiraPortuguese sailors found it uninhabited in 1419 and set the forest alight to clear it; the fire is said to have burned for years, and the island is named for the wood.
• MalagaPicasso was born here in 1881, in a flat on the Plaza de la Merced, and there's a museum of his work a few streets away.
• TenerifeMount Teide stands 3,715 metres over the island, the highest point in Spain and, measured from its base on the sea floor, the third largest volcano on earth.
• VigoEurope's biggest fishing port by weight landed, and it smells honestly of it near the market.

France, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany

• CherbourgTitanic's last call on mainland Europe, on the evening of 10 April 1912, and she never came alongside: tenders carried the passengers out to her.
• HamburgA Hanseatic free city that ran its own affairs for centuries and still calls itself the Free and Hanseatic City.
• La RochelleThree medieval towers stand at the mouth of the old harbour, and a chain was slung between two of them to shut the port at night.
• La Seyne-sur-Mer (for Toulon)A shipbuilding town across the water from Toulon, France's main Mediterranean naval base.
• Le HavreFour fifths of the town was destroyed in September 1944 and Auguste Perret rebuilt the centre in reinforced concrete on a grid, which is now a World Heritage site, listed for the planning rather than for anything old.
• Le Verdon (for Bordeaux)The mouth of the Gironde, where the estuary meets the Atlantic, and a deep water quay built for cargo rather than for a town.
• MarseillesThe oldest city in France, founded by Greek sailors from Phocaea around 600 BC as Massalia, and it has faced the sea rather than Paris ever since.
• RotterdamThe centre was destroyed by bombing on 14 May 1940 and never reconstructed as it had been, so the Dutch city that looks least like a Dutch city is a deliberate choice.
• Zeebrugge (for Bruges)The port is entirely man-made, pushed out into the sea from 1895 because Bruges had lost its own access to it: the Zwin channel silted up in the 1400s and the city simply stopped, which is precisely why it's still medieval.

Caribbean ports

• AntiguaNelson's Dockyard at English Harbour is a working Georgian naval yard that never fell down: Horatio Nelson was based here from 1784, hated it, and called it a vile hole.
• BasseterreSt Kitts was England's first colony in the Caribbean, in 1624, and the French took the other end of the island the same decade.
• BridgetownEnglish from 1627 and never changed hands, which is why the island kept its parliament, its cricket and its place names.
• CastriesBritain and France exchanged this island fourteen times, which is why the towns are French and the law is English.
• Civitavecchia (for Rome)Rome's port since Trajan built it in 106, and his harbour walls are still under the modern quays.
• Cobh (tours to Cork)Titanic's last port of call, on 11 April 1912, when the town was called Queenstown.
• CuracaoWillemstad is a Dutch town built in the tropics and painted every colour there is, and the whole of it is a World Heritage site.
• DominicaThe Nature Island, and the mountains are the reason: rainforest over most of it, and Morne Trois Pitons inland, a World Heritage site with the second largest hot lake in the world steaming in the middle of it.
• Fort de FranceIn May 1902 Mount Pelee destroyed Saint-Pierre, then the island's main city, killing about thirty thousand people in minutes; a prisoner in a thick-walled cell was among the very few to live.
• GrenadaSt George's sits inside a drowned volcanic crater, which is what makes the harbour that shape.
• La Spezia (tours to Florence /Pisa)A naval city at the head of a gulf, and the reason ships call is what sits either side of it: the Cinque Terre villages up the coast, Pisa and Florence inland.
• OranjestadDutch since 1636 and dry as a bone.
• St MaartenThe island has been split between the Dutch and the French since the Treaty of Concordia in 1648, which makes it the smallest piece of land in the world shared by two nations, and there's no border to speak of.
• TortolaRoad Town has been the seat of these islands since the British took them from the Dutch in 1672.