Cruise ship tourism is of no interest for Lisbon says mayor

The Mayor of Lisbon, Carlos Moedas says that cruise ship tourism doesn’t bring money into the city and that he would have never taken the decision to build a new cruise ship terminal in the city’s riverside Santa Apolónia district had he been mayor at the time.

In an interview with Público and Rádio Renascença, Moedas said that if it were up to him he would overturn the 20-year concession and not have cruise ships parked up along the river.

“It’s a type of tourism that doesn’t help the city and is of no interest”, he said, adding that to reduce the concentration of tourists in the city’s downtown area, the city council doubled the tourist tax and is creating cultural facilities that are not all in the same part of the city.

“We need to spread tourism out between the various areas of the city” he said, stressing that tourism represented 20% of the city’s economy and 25% of its employment. However, he denied that Lisbon was suffering from over tourism.

As for a controversial order allowing the Municipal Police to make arrests (normally the scope of the PJ judicial police), Carlos Moedas rejected the idea that it was a concession to the far-right populist party Chega: “This has nothing to do with extreme right or extreme left. This has to do with the safety of the city, with people’s concerns.” And, regarding the criticism that Lisbon’s streets were dirty, the mayor revealed that the council is hiring 200 more workers to collect garbage, complaining of a “dichotomy with the parishes” in which the responsibility for garbage collection was not attributed to just one institution.