What Rotterdam is probably most famous for has long been its port, one the largest in the world by most measures and still the busiest in Europe in volume of traffic. This is partly due to Rotterdam's location near the mouth of the Rhine and Maas Rivers in the densely populated northwestern part of Europe but also due to the Dutch development of extensive port facilities dredged from the very flat land along the riverbanks. Although still first in Europe, where Rotterdam stands in the world is up for debate. On my boat cruise I heard third busiest in the world after Shanghai and Singapore, but a quick internet search now places the top 10 ports in the world in terms of container ship traffic all in Asia. In any event, though, Rotterdam’s container ship traffic is around 12 million TEUs (twenty-foot equivalent units) of containers a year, impressive considering that container shipping only started in the mid-1960s, an technique about the same age as I am that now dominates world trade.

Although the Nieuwe Maas river is very busy at the city of Rotterdam with ships and barges traveling to and from upstream destinations, the main port facilities are downstream . Tour companies offer various cruises from the quay at Erasmus Bridge to the port facilities, the most popular of which go every 90 hour-and-a-half for a 75 minute cruise to the Heysehaven and Waalhaven container port facilities and boat dry docks on the south side of the Maas. While impressive in size, these no longer can handle the biggest new container ships or oil tankers, for which the ports are further downstream near the river’s mouth at the North Sea. But that "Future World" trip to the gargantuan new facilities is on a different longer tour.

The narrated tour passed a number of other interesting spots along the river including Delfshaven, the former harbor connected by canals to the city of Delft from which the pilgrims sailed to America, the Euromast observation tower, a small dry dock where hobby ship architects are constructing a replica of an old sailing ship using only techniques of that era, and several very specialized port facilities. One of those is the European Fruit Port where fruit and vegetables from around the world are kept in old and low CO2 level storage before distribution around Europe, and a special facility for unloading and storing orange juice concentrate for Europe which comes in tankers from Brazil .

From the river you get an impression not only of the development of the port facility but also the extent of Rotterdam city and its strange configuration of oddly-shaped skyscrapers. I say strange configuration because most European cities that have tall buildings such as London, Frankfurt, and Paris (La Defense) the skyscrapers are clustered densely near one or more transit hubs. In Rotterdam, though, they are scattered across the city more like you find in fast-growing Asian cities.

One of the last sights along the river was the S.S. Rotterdam, the largest Dutch-built ocean liner in service across the Atlantic from 1958 to 1972 and then used as a cruise ship. Nowadays the Rotterdam is moored in port permanently and used as a hotel, restaurants, stores, and a permanent tourist attraction. It did get me to thinking about my mother’s sailing to America in 1955, which if I recall correctly from her stories was on a ship named the Maasdam rather than one of the Rotterdam’s four earlier versions bearing the same name, but I believe her port of embarkation was Rotterdam rather than Antwerp, Belgium. If so, the last few miles of the Maas/Rhine before the North Sea would have been the last she saw of Europe for 30 years until her first of two visits back to the continent in 1985.