Bradley’s Two Cents on Cruise Tourism

Darrell Bradley

As we said earlier, an article on Yahoo Travel earlier this week named Belize City as one of the five worst ports of calls for cruise ships in the Caribbean. The writer cites specifically that while the tours and trips to sites across the country are great, the old capital itself has little to do and is, in a word, dreary. News Five asked Mayor Darrell Bradley about this, since he is the administrative head of the city. He didn’t exactly blast the article as untrue, but maintains that a lot of work has been done to combat exactly the claim made in it.  According to the Mayor, the Strategic Master Plan for the city speaks to the development of an onshore cruise port, and in the absence of that, the stimulation of some sort of port facility, like the Stake Bank project, for example. And he’s all for the continued improvement of the city, whatever it takes, except he’s been bogged down with the complications of municipal leadership.

Darrell Bradley, Belize City Mayor

“These are things which I think we need to move with a great deal of alacrity. Part of the development strategy that we have had is to develop the waterfront…we’ve talked about Battlefield Park, Memorial Park, BTL Park…we’ve done the entire infrastructure along the waterfront in terms of it being a fully concreted area. We have looked at setting up a map for Belize City, we are integrating businesses…I have a list of about forty businesses including a bicycle area along the waterfront, other activities along the waterfront, people have written me about hot air balloons in Belize City…we have so much water around Belize City and we don’t have any water-sports in Belize City, so all of these businesses are viable in terms of flowing from the master plan and we’re working with our partners like CARILED in terms of specifically targeting people to engage in these types of activities. We’re also looking at setting up what we call a business improvement area. Our last manifesto talked about developing the downtown into a duty-free free zone which will encourage investment into the downtown. I’ve talked about the four lane highway along the Northern Highway which is going to be the new commercial district for Belize City. So we are looking at all of these plans in terms of making Belize City strategically placed as the economic and commercial centre of the country and for the last four months I have been bogged down in discussions talking about a hundred and sixty staff.”