Wasting time with the smoke of the offshore wind lobby is not very productive. Neither the massive diversion of routes around Africa nor the instability in the Middle East manage to awaken a port that is losing the pulse of the Atlantic to the aggressiveness of Tenerife. The mediocrity of the figures published by Ports of the State this quarter is not a statistical bump; it is a symptom of operational decline.
With the Red Sea blocked and carriers desperately searching for safe ports on the route around the Cape, the Port of Las Palmas has responded with incomprehensible paralysis. While the geopolitical scenario in the Middle East served up a historic opportunity for absolute dominance, Las Palmas has reported a 2.5% decline in bunker. It is confirmation that the port no longer knows how to read the market; it has gone from being the reference ‘hub’ to becoming a passive spectator of its own loss of significance.
The comparison with Santa Cruz de Tenerife has ceased to be an anecdote and has turned into a commercial humiliation. The 44.6% growth in the neighboring port demonstrates that the business was there, but Las Palmas has been unable to capture it. For any investment analyst, this contrast is devastating: it shows that Tenerife has an attack structure, while Las Palmas suffers from strategic myopia that prevents it from reacting to the biggest logistical reconfiguration of the century. The port has become complacent in institutional gigantism, forgetting that in high-level maritime business, agility is the only thing that protects margins.
Even in container traffic, the 83,430 TEUs of March represent a survival figure, not a leadership one. At a moment of maximum tension in global supply chains, Las Palmas should have acted as the lung of the Atlantic; instead, it has maintained a low, bureaucratic profile lacking ambition. The Middle East crisis has been the ultimate stress test, and the results are clear: the current management model of Las Palmas is insufficient to compete at the elite level.
This stagnation amid the surge in traffic around the Cape of Good Hope is a warning to major operators: the reliability of Las Palmas is under suspicion. If the port cannot grow in the face of the greatest collapse of security in the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, when will it? The reality is that while the world was in turmoil in the Bab el-Mandeb Strait, Las Palmas was staring at its own navel, allowing the sovereignty of bunkering and transshipment to shift to other docks with a forward-looking vision.
