The Port of Bremerhaven is one of Germany’s busiest seaports and Europe’s leading car-handling port, lining the east bank of the Weser estuary where the river meets the North Sea, about 50 km downstream of the city of Bremen. Founded in 1827 as Bremen’s outer harbour, it handled 4.45 million TEU (twenty-foot equivalent units) of containers in 2024, ranking 46th in the world in Lloyd’s List figures for the Bremen port group, and more than 2 million vehicles pass through its car terminal in a typical year. Its container terminal has a single unbroken quay of 4,930 m, entered in the Guinness records in 2010 as the largest contiguous container terminal in the world. Because the port runs for kilometres along one riverbank, the best way to understand it is to travel along it, from the old harbours in the south to the container berths in the north.
Starting Point: the Alter and Neuer Hafen, Bought from Hanover in 1827
The tour begins where the Geeste river flows into the Weser, in the city centre. Bremen needed this spot because the lower Weser had been silting up since about 1400, and laden sea-going ships could no longer reach the city. Earlier outer harbours, such as Vegesack in 1622–23, soon lost their depth too. In 1827 Bremen’s mayor Johann Smidt bought land at the river mouth from the Kingdom of Hanover, and the first harbour basin, the Alter Hafen, opened in 1830.
A few steps north lies the Neuer Hafen, opened in 1852 as a basin 480 m long and 90 m wide, with a bulge at its north-eastern end so the steamers of the Norddeutscher Lloyd could turn. It is now a marina, entered since July 2005 through a small lock up to 62.5 m long. The quay has a darker history too: on 11 December 1875 a cask of explosives blew up beside the emigrant ship Mosel, killing 83 people.
A short detour south across the Geeste leads to the Fischereihafen, the fishing port that grew up in Geestemünde, the rival town that Hanover founded across the Geeste in 1845. Its industrial era began in 1885, when the merchant Friedrich Busse sent out the steam trawler Sagitta, and its first fish auction was held on 13 June 1888. Geestemünde and Bremerhaven were only united in 1939, as part of Prussian Wesermünde, and the whole town returned to the state of Bremen in 1947.
The Havenwelten Museums: Emigrants, Climate and a Cog from 1380
Around these basins are the museums of the Havenwelten waterfront. The German Emigration Center, opened on 8 August 2005, is Europe’s largest museum devoted to emigration, a reminder that for some decades after 1832, when a Bremen law set minimum standards for emigrant passengers, the ports of Bremen were the most important emigrant harbour of central Europe. Nearby are the Klimahaus Bremerhaven 8° Ost, opened in 2009, and the German Maritime Museum, designed by Hans Scharoun and opened in 1975, which displays a Hanseatic cog from about 1380 found in Bremen in 1962.
North to the Columbuskaje: Liners, Elvis and 320,000 Cruise Passengers
Walking north along the dyke, the next stop is the Columbuskaje, a quay built directly on the Weser and finished in 1927 so that big liners could berth without waiting for a lock. It was about 1,000 m long and was named after the Norddeutscher Lloyd flagship Columbus. A station on the quay let passengers step from boat trains straight onto the ships of the America line, and in the 1930s the Blue Riband liners Bremen and Europa berthed here. In 1958 Elvis Presley came ashore at the Columbuskaje as a US Army private; a bronze plaque at the 700-metre mark recalls it.
Liner traffic faded after the 1950s, but cruise ships replaced it. The terminal counted 246,995 passengers from 130 calls in 2019 and a record of about 320,000 in 2023. After a rebuild finished in November 2024, which moved the quay edge about 20 m forward and added 57 m passenger bridges, it is designed for up to 500,000 passengers a year. Since 1 January 2025 it has been run by Global Ports Holding as Bremerhaven Cruise Port.
Through the Kaiserschleuse and the Nordschleuse
Behind the Columbuskaje lie the enclosed docks, reached through two sea locks that keep the water level constant regardless of the tide. The southern one is the Kaiserschleuse. When it opened in 1897 it measured 223.2 m between its gates and 28 m across, making it by far the largest lock in the world; it took more than 20,000 piles and 25 million bricks. Between 2007 and 2011 it was rebuilt to 305 m long and 55 m wide, the same width as the new Panama Canal locks of 2016. The first ship through the new lock in April 2011 was the car carrier Fidelio.
The northern entrance is the Nordschleuse, built between 1928 and 1931 so that the Lloyd’s new express liners Bremen and Europa could reach the enlarged Kaiserdock II. With a usable length of 375 m and a width of 45 m, it is still among the largest locks in the world. Its three brick machine houses, designed by Karl Felge in the style of the Neues Bauen, have been listed monuments since 2001.
The Kaiserhäfen and BLG’s Car Terminal: Over 2 Million Vehicles a Year
Inside the locks are the Kaiserhäfen I to III, the Verbindungshafen and the Nordhafen, basins that once served general cargo and liners and now form the heart of the vehicle trade. The operator, BLG Logistics, which began in 1877 as the Bremer Lagerhaus-Gesellschaft, runs Europe’s largest car transshipment centre and car workshop here. The docks themselves belong not to the town but to the city of Bremen, which has owned this “overseas port” area inside Bremerhaven since 1927. BLG’s turn to vehicle logistics started in the early 1980s with contracts for Volkswagen and later Daimler-Benz.
The volumes are large. In 2011 the ports of Bremen handled 2.1 million cars, and in 2014 Bremerhaven alone handled 2.3 million. Bremerhaven imports and exports more cars than any other city in Europe. Vehicles arrive by train and truck from German factories and are driven up the ramps of roll-on/roll-off ships in the basins, while another million tonnes of “high and heavy” cargo, such as tractors and construction machinery, moves on the same ro-ro vessels. The rebuilding of the Kaiserschleuse to Panamax width was driven partly by the growing size of these car carriers.
Along the 4,930-Metre Stromkaje, from CT I to CT IV
North of the Nordschleuse the character of the port changes completely. Instead of basins behind locks, container ships moor directly on the river at the Stromkaje, the “river quay” of the Wilhelm Kaisen Container Terminal. Work started in February 1968 on the first 700 m of quay, financed by BLG, and the first berth opened in April 1971. The terminal was then extended in stages: southwards from 1978 and northwards from 1980, making it the continent’s largest container facility when the northern extension opened in August 1983; CT III, completed in December 1997; CT IIIa, which added 340 m in November 2003; and CT IV, opened on 12 September 2008 in the district of Weddewarden.
Eurogate, MSC Gate and North Sea Terminal: Who Works the Quay
Today the quay runs unbroken for 4,930 m with 14 berths and about 3 km² of storage area. It is operated by Eurogate, founded in 1999 by BLG and Hamburg’s Eurokai, together with two joint ventures, MSC Gate with the shipping line MSC and North Sea Terminal Bremerhaven with Maersk. In September 2006 the Emma Mærsk, then the world’s second-largest container ship, made her first call here. The federal government deepened the outer Weser channel to 14 m in 1999 so that large ships could reach the terminal largely independent of the tide, and the turning basin in the river was widened to 600 m.
Much of the traffic is transshipment. In 2010, about 3.0 million of the 4.9 million TEU handled moved on to other ports by feeder ship; of the 1.9 million TEU travelling inland, 51% went by truck, 45% by rail and just 4% by barge. Two years earlier, the leading countries served by sea from the Bremen ports were China, the United States, Russia, Poland, Finland, Sweden and Norway.
Weddewarden and the Numbers at the End of the Quay
The tour ends at the northern tip of CT IV in Weddewarden, looking out over the mudflats of the outer Weser towards the German Bight. Throughput along the quay grew from 0.61 million TEU in 1980 to 2.72 million in 2000 and 5.91 million in 2011, and it stayed between 5.4 and 5.8 million from 2014 to 2017. Since then it has eased: Lloyd’s List recorded 4.18 million TEU for the Bremen ports in 2023, 48th in the world, and 4.45 million in 2024, 46th. The same company, Eurogate, also runs the container terminal at the JadeWeserPort in Wilhelmshaven on the neighbouring Jade estuary, so the same operator works both of these deep-water container terminals on the German North Sea coast.
The quay itself came at an environmental price. The approval for CT IV in June 2004 required compensation habitat on the Luneplate, a former Weser island south of the city, and along the Wurster coast, and the old Weser fort Brinkamahof II disappeared under the CT IIIa extension. For a comparison with Germany’s other great container port on the Elbe, see our guide to the Port of Hamburg; for the sea that both ports serve, read our North Sea guide.