The Port of Algeciras is Spain’s largest port, spread around the Bay of Gibraltar (also called the Bay of Algeciras) in Andalusia, with the Rock of Gibraltar across the water and Morocco about 14 km away across the Strait of Gibraltar at its narrowest point. The Port Authority of Algeciras Bay reported about 100.7 million tonnes of cargo and 4.74 million TEU of containers in 2025, and Lloyd’s List ranked it 44th among the world’s container ports on 2024 volumes of about 4.71 million TEU. Its first modern facility was a wooden jetty built in 1894, and it matters because most of its boxes are transshipped between ships on the east–west routes through the Strait, while its ferry quays carry people and lorries to Tangier and Ceuta.
Those figures describe the cargo. This article is about the people who built the port, the people who work and live beside it, the neighbours who compete with it or share its water, and the environmental price that the bay pays for it.
Refugees, Kings and a Wooden Jetty at the Río de la Miel
Unlike most large European ports, Algeciras is young. In Roman times shipping in the bay centred on Carteia and on Portus Albus, the “White Port” on the site of modern Algeciras. The medieval Muslim town of al-Jazira al-Khadra became the crossing point between Iberia and North Africa, but after the Nasrids of Granada took it from Castile in 1369 they razed it, moving the garrison to Gibraltar, a worse harbour but an easier place to defend.
The people who refounded Algeciras came from the other side of the bay. When Anglo-Dutch forces captured Gibraltar in 1704, its Spanish inhabitants fled and settled around the shore, and only the resettlement at Algeciras was on the water’s edge. In 1705 a visitor described the site as a heap of stones among ruins. The refugees expected to go home, but the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 ceded Gibraltar to Britain, and they stayed. Immigrants from elsewhere in Spain and from Italy followed, lifting the population from 1,845 in 1725 to 6,241 in 1787, and Charles III rebuilt the town on its rectangular street plan in 1760.
Even then there was no proper port. The first facility came only in 1894, a wooden jetty at the mouth of the Río de la Miel, the small river that gave the medieval town its twin halves and now runs mostly underground. From that jetty the port has grown to more than 10 km of quays in separate basins around the bay. Isla Verde, the islet that once sat in front of the town and may have given it its Arabic name, is now buried under port land. The port authority also runs the port of Tarifa, and its facilities stretch into the municipalities of Los Barrios, San Roque and La Línea de la Concepción.
The waterfront drew outsiders long before containers did. In July 1801 French and Spanish squadrons fought the Royal Navy off the town in the Algeciras campaign. In 1906 the Algeciras Conference met in the town hall to settle the international crisis over Morocco, confirming Moroccan independence while giving France control of its banking and police. In July 1942 Italian frogmen hid in the interned tanker Olterra, moored at Algeciras, and used it as a secret base to attack Allied shipping at Gibraltar.
Dockers, Ferry Crews and the 123,078 People of Algeciras
Algeciras had a registered population of 123,078 in 2020, the largest in the Campo de Gibraltar, and the wider metropolitan area, including Los Barrios, La Línea, San Roque, Tarifa, Castellar and Jimena, had 263,739. The city’s main economic activities are tied to the port, alongside a fishing fleet and farm exports from the surrounding countryside such as cereals and livestock.
Much of that working population arrived in the second half of the 20th century. Under Franco, Algeciras went through substantial industrial development, which created jobs for local workers who had lost theirs when Spain sealed the land border with Gibraltar between 1969 and 1982.
The passenger side of the port employs a different workforce. Algeciras is the main embarkation point between Spain and Morocco, with sailings to Tangier by Baleària, FRS, Inter Shipping and Trasmediterránea and to the Spanish city of Ceuta by Baleària, FRS and Trasmediterránea. The fastest ferries across the Strait take as little as 35 minutes. The port also serves Melilla and the Canary Islands, and handles cruise calls and roll-on/roll-off freight, so drivers, deck crews, customs officers and ticket staff make up a large share of the people who depend on it.
Feeder Ships, Transshipment and the Rival at Tanger Med
The container business depends on a handful of shipping companies rather than on local demand. Algeciras is primarily a transshipment port: large ships on the main east–west routes unload boxes here, and smaller feeder ships carry them onward. That leaves its volumes tied to how the shipping lines route their services through the Strait. Rankings show how big that business became: in 2010 the World Shipping Council placed Algeciras 7th among Europe’s container ports and 28th in the world, and by 2018 it had climbed to 31st worldwide.
The numbers show a port that grew fast and has since levelled off. Container traffic rose from about 2.81 million TEU in 2010 to a peak of about 5.13 million TEU in 2019, according to Lloyd’s List, then settled at about 4.7 million TEU from 2022 onward. In 2025 the port authority counted 4.74 million TEU.
The main reason for the plateau sits on the African shore. Tanger Med, 45 km north-east of Tangier and about 15 km from Tarifa, competes directly with Algeciras for the Strait’s transshipment market. It handled about 10.24 million TEU in 2024 and ranked 17th in the world on Lloyd’s List, more than double Algeciras’s volume. Morocco built it as a national priority, with a second port, Tanger Med II, approved in January 2009.
Gibraltar Across the Bay: Bunkers, Borders and Disputed Water
The bay itself is small for the traffic it carries: about 10 km long and 8 km wide, some 75 km² in area, but up to 400 metres deep in the centre. From west to east its shore is divided between Algeciras, Los Barrios, San Roque and La Línea on the Spanish side and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar on the east. Sovereignty over the water is disputed. The United Kingdom asserts a 3-nautical-mile limit around Gibraltar with a line down the middle of the bay; Spain recognises British sovereignty only over the waters of the port of Gibraltar itself, citing the 1713 Treaty of Utrecht. The disagreement has led to incidents over Spanish fishing boats in waters Gibraltar claims.
The two sides are also commercial neighbours. Selling fuel to passing ships, known as bunkering, is big business in the Strait: Algeciras, Ceuta and Gibraltar together form Europe’s second-largest bunker market after the Amsterdam–Rotterdam–Antwerp area. Gibraltar delivered about 4.3 million tonnes of bunker fuel in 2007, up from 840,000 tonnes in 1990. Algeciras sold about 2.4 million tonnes in 2008, when 2,173 of the 24,535 vessels calling at the port took on fuel. Much of that fuel comes from the CEPSA refinery at San Roque and is delivered by barge to ships on both sides of the bay.
What the Bay Pays: Refinery Flares, Spills and 151 Wreck Sites
The environmental cost falls on the same few kilometres of water. The Spanish shore is heavily industrialised. The CEPSA Gibraltar–San Roque refinery covers 1.5 million m², employs about 1,000 people and produced 13.8 million tonnes of fuel in 2015. A serious sulphur release in 2007 and repeated flaring provoked public protests and led the Andalusian environment ministry to order an independent audit. In May 1998 an accident at the Acerinox stainless-steel plant in Los Barrios released a radioactive cloud that was later detected in France, Italy, Switzerland, Germany and Austria at levels up to 142 times normal.
Shipping adds its own risk. Sinkings, groundings and collisions involving the New Flame, the Spa Bunker IV, the Samothraki, the Sierra Nava, the Tawe and the Fedra have caused oil spills on both sides of the bay. Greenpeace has described the bay as suffering “chronic pollution” from hydrocarbons, caused not only by accidents but by routine ballast discharge, ship-to-ship bunkering and tank cleaning. Spanish and Gibraltarian environmental groups jointly pressed the Tripartite Forum in 2009 to act. A 2015 Gibraltar government report, by contrast, rated the ecological and chemical status of Gibraltar’s coastal waters as good.
The bay remains a living place despite this. Common, striped and bottlenose dolphins breed here, migratory whales pass through, and dolphins and whales sometimes swim into the port itself. Whale-watching boats leave from both Algeciras and Gibraltar. Beneath the surface lies the record of 3,000 years of shipping: a survey by Spanish archaeologists between 2020 and 2023 identified 151 underwater sites in the bay, including 124 shipwrecks dating from the Punic period to modern times.
Algeciras shows how a narrow strait turns a small town into a global port. For the waterway that makes it possible, see our guide to the Strait of Gibraltar; for the territory on the other side of the bay, read what Gibraltar is; and for the rival terminals across the water, turn to the Tanger Med port.