Finishing touches soon to be made at cruise ship terminal in Visby

Visby's new cruise ship quay will soon be ready. Building work commenced in winter 2016 as part of a process that will reach its end in March 2018, when CMP takes over the facilities. The first cruise ship is scheduled to arrive at the new ultra-modern terminal just a few weeks later.

The site has been a hotbed of activity since winter 2016. Roughly 130,000 cubic metres were dredged around the quay to achieve a water depth of 11 metres. The majority of the dredged material has since been used to fill in the newly created land, which measures 12,000 square metres in area, providing a space for everything from the terminal building to parking spaces for transfer buses and taxis.

"The quay has space for two cruise ships of up to 340 metres in length to moor simultaneously, plus space on the premises for about 20 buses to park up at the same time," says Harald Gröttvik, project manager of the cruise ship quay project.

Wastewater managementAt the moment, work is ongoing to lay piping from the ground at the premises to the jetty. These pipes need to supply the vessels with fresh water, but will also be used to remove wastewater from them. Two cisterns have been installed on the quay premises and connected to the town's sewage system. These cisterns will be used to store wastewater before it is channelled to the treatment plant in Visby, which lies immediately south of the cruise ship quay.

"At the moment we are also working on creating well casings and on laying down electricity cabling between the ground at the premises and the quay. Once that is done, we will be able to install the lighting," Harald Gröttvik tells us.

Running in parallel with this is reinforcement work for the ground at the premises. All 12,000 square metres will then be paved to finish off this area.

"The terminal building will be ready in November-December," says Harald Gröttvik. Measuring around 300 square metres in area, it will have space for a tourist information centre and toilets, plus space for customs, border police staff and ship crews.

Now that all the pieces are falling into place, it's also time for inspections to take place; these will begin in December and are expected to finish no later than February. Just over a month after that it will then be time to hand over the facilities to CMP. Although the project has run to schedule, it has not been without its challenges, as Harald Gröttvik points out:

"The weather has been the biggest challenge, especially when the waves prevented our work and forced us to rethink. That said, we have been assisted by resourceful people who always found new solutions to the problems and made sure that the teamwork worked well."