Definition
Transhipment is the operation by which a container is unloaded from one ship and loaded onto another in the same port, without leaving the port area. Spanish statistics call it traffic in transit.
It is the basis of the shipping lines’ system: the largest ships call at a few ports, and from there the cargo is redistributed on smaller vessels to its final destination. A transhipped container has neither its origin nor its destination in the port’s country, so it depends not on that country’s economy but on the shipping lines’ routing decisions.
The counterpart of transhipment is import and export traffic, which enters or leaves by land and does reflect the activity of the territory the port serves. The same TEU total can hide very different splits between the two.
The figure · August 2026
Year to date · January–August 2026
6.47 million TEU
August 2026 only
787,236 TEU
First port
2.73 million TEU
Containerised cargo in transhipment
73.8 million tonnes
Container transhipment in Spanish ports in 2026
Spanish ports handled 6.47 million TEU in the year to August 2026, 0.3% less than in the same period of 2025. In August alone, the figure was 787,236 TEU, 6.2% less than in August 2025.
The full ranking, the trend and the table are in the indicator Container transhipment in Spanish ports. To explore the data in detail, see PortStats · transhipped cargo, annual series.