MSC Magnifica Brings Mediterranean Touch To Freo

MSC Magnifica arrived at around 7.30 this morning from Busselton. With a stunning blue sky and sea, Freo could have been somewhere in the Med.

Mind you, 5 years ago almost to the day, in the thick of Covid when Premier McGowan was busy shunting cruise ships as far from Freo as possible, MSC Magnifica was an unwelcome visitor. More on that below.

But here she is today, on a 120 days, round-trip World Cruise, themed ‘Easter’.

The cruise began in Rome on 4 January 2025, and will have visited 46 destinations across 21 countries and 5 continents by the time she returns to Rome on 4 May 2025.

Btw, both Rome and Barcelona are becoming preferred embarkation ports by Australian guests.

MSC Magnifica is a 15-year old, MSC Musica class cruise ship that is family friendly. She can accommodate 3,000 guests and boasts 5,000 daily serves of coffee and 25 kilograms of ice cream and gelato. The ship’s Godmother is Italian actress, Sophia Loren.

And here’s another gallery of her arrival today in Freo.

There are 1875 passengers onboard her on this visit to Freo. 195 will disembark at Freo and 8 new passengers will embark. This ship is carrying 957-crew.

She departs Freo tomorrow night at 6 pm.

‘Leave and go home’

Five years ago, almost to the day, Covid was on all our minds, and MSC Magnifica was denied entry to Fremantle. The Premier, Mark McGowan said at the time, ‘Leave and go home’ to three cruise ships off the Fremantle coast. One of them was MSC Magnifica. Chaos ensued with threats of military assistance to prevent cruise ships docking. MSC Magnifica left for Dubai but was denied access to ports there.

She was returning to Fremantle to refuel and re-provision, when the Premier revealed an ‘emergency’: ‘the MSC Magnifica preparing to dock carrying 250 sick passengers, potentially needing hospitalization’. This statement sparked a major emergency response in WA, with authorities scrambling to free up hospital beds. Nobody on board was allowed to disembark. Police and Border Force patrolled the port. It transpired that there were no Covid cases on the ship. To date neither the cruise operator nor the Government has accepted blame.

Here is one of our reports from the time reflecting on the cruise ship entry challenges.

She then refuelled and departed.

Drug Charges

Let’s hope this visit to Fremantle is event free. On 15 March 2025, while the ship was in Sydney, a 48-year old Brazilian National passenger on the cruise ship was charged with smuggling cocaine into Australia. Twenty-eight individually wrapped packages of cocaine were apparently found hidden in the ceiling cavity of his cabin. An AFP Detective Superintendent stated that this amount of cocaine could have been sold in the community as 10,000 street deals of 1 gram to the value of $3 million. The ship had visited Brazil and Argentina in late January. The maximum penalty for a crime such as this is life imprisonment.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow

MSC Magnifica will be in port overnight until tomorrow, Thursday 27 March, when she will depart at 6pm for Broome and then Malé, Kaafu Atoll, Maldives.

* Words and photographs by Jean Hudson our Shipping Correspondent. Jean is also a regular feature writer and photographer here on the Shipping News. You may also like to follow up her informative Places I Love stories, as well as other feature stories and Freo Today photographs, right here.

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