TOURIST INVASION

MORE than 5,500 tourists invaded Cartagena for a period of six hours on Thursday, May 5. Bars, shops, especially gift shops, saw their sales shoot up between 30 per cent and 70 per cent when tourists and crew members from the cruise ships that docked flooded the local businesses.

This week saw a record number of cruise ships docking in Cartagena port. Cruise ships ‘Celebrity Re‐flection’, which is the sec‐ond of the three Celebrity ships docking this week, and the ‘Explorer of the

AVIATION giant Ryanair has an ‐nounced they will use Sustain ‐able Aviation Fuel (SAF) pro ‐duced by Repsol, the Spanish energy company. Both compa ‐nies released a statement on Thursday May 4 to announce a strategic agreement to promote the use of renewable fuels in Spain and Portugal. The renew ‐able fuel will be manufactured by Repsol in Escombreras in Cartagena for Ryanair aircraft.

SAF is key for the decarbonisa‐tion of aviation, but it only repre‐sents a small fraction of current aircraft use worldwide. With this agreement, Repsol will provide Ryanair with access to a maxi ‐mum of 155,000 tones of SAF be‐tween 2025 and 2030. This is equivalent to more than 28,000 flights from Dublin to Madrid.

The use of this amount of re ‐newable fuel will reduce CO2 emissions by approximately 490,000 tons.

Seas from the Royal Caribbean shipping com ‐pany.

The tourists didn’t just spend the day shopping, the museums also noted a large influx of visitors. With the cruise ships docking from 8am, some of the tourists chose to visit other towns in the region like Lorca and Car ‐avaca de la Cruz.

Ten ships have arrived so far this month with 13,200 passengers with 20 more expected before the month is over, bringing another 26,000 tourists to Cartagena.