This cosmos keeps the continent going: the port of Rotterdam is the largest in Europe. And as such, it is the central hub for everything that fits in a container, delivers raw materials or has energy ready.
Image: dpa
Whether it’s an ocean giant or the smallest hydrogen molecule, almost all of them have to go through the port of Rotterdam. Energy crises, sanction packages and container jams do not make the work any easier – but they do make it inventive.
FOne only ever counts soccer fields out of embarrassment. Their so-and-so much signals that a number is actually unimaginably large and someone is making a last-ditch effort to translate it into something imaginable. The port of Rotterdam thwarted this venture magnificently. It’s the size of 17,456 football pitches, plus one half of the game, roughly. The containers are stacked so high and far that they shrink into colorful pixel images in the distance, while the bus roars more than 40 kilometers on the autobahn from the easternmost point of the port, in the heart of the Dutch metropolis, to its western tip to come where it touches the North Sea. Past containers, oil tanks, pipelines, refineries, shipyards, wind turbines, ships.
Until 2004, the port of Rotterdam was the largest in the world. Globally, China can now adorn itself with the title, but it is still the largest in Europe. And if you subtract everything that has passed through him from your own household, the booth would suddenly be pretty empty. “Made in China” may still apply. “Moved through Rotterdam” as well. Times aren’t easy for the continent’s most important hub either. Rotterdam is huge and yet a bottleneck. Whatever’s going on in the world, a pandemic, disrupted supply chains, a ship in the Suez Canal, war – it’s pretty much undisguised here.