PORTUS turns 50: Seville hosts the debate on the future of the port–city interface
Seville hosted the launch of issue 50 of PORTUS magazine, published by RETE, the International Association for Collaboration between Ports and Cities, which has spent 25 years following waterfront transformation, port governance and the regeneration of maritime frontages. The event, “Portus 50: conectando experiencias, construyendo futuro” (Portus 50: connecting experiences, building the future), was held in collaboration with the Port Authority of Seville.
A first panel on the magazine’s legacy was moderated by Teófila Martínez, president of RETE and of the Port Authority of the Bay of Cádiz, with Rinio Bruttomesso, founder of RETE and the magazine’s first editor, and José Luis Estrada, RETE’s first president and editor of PORTUS from 2019 to 2026. Rafael Carmona, president of the Port Authority of Seville and vice-president of RETE, then chaired the panel on port–city integration.
Three ports, three lessons for Seville
Ibon Areso, former mayor of Bilbao, recalled that the transformation of Abandoibarra through Bilbao Ría 2000 was not merely an exercise in image but an economic and urban reconfiguration: the city improved its port operations by moving them out to the Abra and created a new centrality on the former port land. His thesis: mixed use is not a desirable extra but a condition of viability.
César Díaz, president of the Port Authority of Santander, described a different process, built on successive agreements between the port, the city council and public and private stakeholders—the Centro Botín, the undergrounding of traffic, the extension of the Jardines de Pereda. His talk yielded a particularly valuable idea: the heritage value of these spaces often lies not in the building but in the collective memory of what once happened there.
David Pino, director of the Gerència Urbanística Port Vell, added the layer of governance: a dedicated institutional structure, with representation from both port and city, that allows decisions to be agreed before they are carried out. Fishing, sailing, cruises, culture and blue-economy initiatives share its 70 hectares.
Seville: 57 hectares of port land in the heart of the city
Seville’s vision was presented by José María de Cárdenas, co-founder of EDDEA and head of the DUP Technical Office. The starting point is unusual in Europe: 57 hectares of port land right in the city centre, where port activity is still very much alive—around 90 cruise calls a year. The challenge is not to act on a void but to transform an active interface so that it stops working as an edge and starts working as a gateway.
De Cárdenas made the case for active heritage: the warehouses on Avenida de las Razas built for the 1929 Ibero-American Exposition, the sheds of the Muelle de Tablada, the cranes, the cobbles, the quay edge. Preserving does not mean freezing, and one of the keys to the masterplan is to turn that legacy into a framework for new uses: the Galería de los Tinglados as a covered route, the 1929 warehouses for offices and university uses, a shed for the new Cruise Terminal and the Port Center.
Productive diversification, not just physical opening
The day’s conclusion reinforces an idea EDDEA has been working on for some time: port–city integration is not only about opening land up to public use, but about building an urban system that can mix activities, sustain itself economically and keep the memory of the place legible.
To this the debate added two issues it identified as structural: an integrated energy logic—the demand generated by cruise ships means power supply and shore connection solutions have to be anticipated in the port, and a district energy community would be a strategic piece of the model—and governance: without institutional alignment, these processes slow down or stall.