Mediterranean Cruise

Why Mediterranean Cruise works

The Mediterranean Sea is an intercontinental sea between Europe, Asia and Africa, almost entirely enclosed by land: the Levant to the east, Anatolia and southern Europe to the north, and North Africa to the south. It connects west to the Atlantic Ocean through the Strait of Gibraltar, a gap of only 14 kilometres between Spain and Morocco, and reaches the Black Sea via the Bosporus and the Red Sea via the Suez Canal in the southeast, a 163-kilometre artificial waterway that links the two seas without a single lock. Covering about 2,500,000 square kilometres, the Mediterranean includes fifteen marginal seas, among them the Aegean, Adriatic and Tyrrhenian, the waters that carry many of the region's classic cruise itineraries between Spain, Italy, Greece and the eastern Mediterranean coast.

The Mediterranean basin is sometimes described as an incubator of Western civilization, having hosted some of the earliest advanced societies, including Egypt, the Minoans and later the Greek city-states and Phoenicians, both of which extensively colonised its coastlines for trade. Following the Punic Wars, the Roman Republic defeated Carthage to become the dominant power in the Western Mediterranean, and after Augustus founded the Roman Empire, the Romans called the sea Mare Nostrum, "Our Sea," controlling virtually its entire coastline from Gibraltar to the Levant for roughly four centuries — long enough that the sea was nicknamed the Roman Lake. Arab rule across parts of the western Mediterranean, including Spain and Sicily, later introduced crops such as citrus fruit, rice, sugarcane and saffron into the region's agriculture and cuisine, along with continued cultivation of the olive that had already defined Mediterranean farming since Greco-Roman times.

Among the Mediterranean's major port cities, Barcelona, on Spain's northeastern coast, is the capital of Catalonia and Spain's second-most populous municipality after Madrid, with about 1.7 million people within city limits and an urban area of some 5.7 million; tradition holds it was founded by either Phoenician or Carthaginian traders. It later became capital of the medieval County of Barcelona and grew into the main economic and administrative centre of the Crown of Aragon after Catalonia's union with the Kingdom of Aragon. The city sits on the coast between the mouths of the Llobregat and Besòs rivers, bounded inland by the Serra de Collserola mountains, a setting shared in different forms by other classic Mediterranean cruise ports around the Aegean and the Tyrrhenian Sea.

Much of the Mediterranean coastline has a hot-summer Mediterranean climate, with mild, wet winters and calm, dry, hot summers; tropical cyclones are rare here but do occasionally form, typically between September and November. This seasonal rhythm has shaped Mediterranean travel for centuries, favouring the calmer, drier months for coastal navigation between the region's ports, from the Iberian coast to the Greek islands and on toward the Levant.

Tourism along the Mediterranean coast dates back to antiquity, with Roman-era villas on the Amalfi Coast and at Barcola among the earliest evidence of leisure travel to its shores; the beaches became a draw for European travellers from the end of the nineteenth century, and mass tourism took hold after the Second World War as first trains and buses, then aircraft, made the coast easier to reach. Tourism remains one of the most important sources of income for Mediterranean countries today, sustaining small coastal communities and islands as well as the region's larger port cities such as Barcelona.

• Mediterranean Sea — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0
• Barcelona — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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