Santa Cruz de Tenerife Port Authority has a Service Coordination Centre, which is fundamental for monitoring all maritime and land traffic within the port, providing real-time information for all departments about events.

The Services Coordination Centre encompasses maritime and ground-based surveillance and is the link between both. It manages stopovers, coordination and operations 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. In this way, it exercises full control over all kinds of approaching vessels, internal movement, berthing and anchorage, as well as any other kind of event or emergency that may occur in the port.

The Services Coordination Centre allows the port authority to make closer contact with the quay and the sea, gathering navigational and maritime information that it then redistributes in real time to the authority’s various departments. It also guarantees real-time data gathering and insertion for the invoicing department. The system is highly successful because the control centre is the pivot around which the coordinated interaction of information provided by the Harbour Police and each department revolves.

In order to guarantee this communication, Puertos de Tenerife is equipped with microwave radio-relay systems and FSO laser technology with 100 Mbps broadband.

The port authority’s maritime traffic control centre interacts with vessel traffic entering and leaving, monitoring all operations involved in this process from an hour before vessel arrival, or within the two-mile limit, and until they leave the port area. All corresponding orders are relayed from the centre to each vessel, including information about the operations and the provision of services from pilots, mooring personnel, tugs and the Harbour Police.

For these purposes, the centre is equipped with an AIS (Automatic Identification System), which enables the port authority to detect units of over 300 GT within a radius of 100 miles as well as their characteristics, including ETA (estimated time of arrival), distance from port (MMSI-Maritime Mobile Service Identity) and their call sign. Smaller vessels are monitored by two radars, 9’ and 19,’ respectively, based on IMO-approved S57 electronic navigational charts.


Team-work is essential to the success of this service that the coordination centre has set up with maritime rescue, enabling them to function as an internal and external maritime unit, respectively.

Berthing or stopover management receives requests for services from vessels, shipping agents, shipping lines, stevedoring companies and, generally speaking, all port customers. It then proceeds to redistribute these requests and coordinate service provision with all the port authority’s departments.

Ground-based surveillance is responsible for coordinating all the cameras installed in the port. This system enables the recording of operations in real time and monitors the alarms installed in the port authority and Puerto-Ciudad buildings, and Muelle Norte Maritime Station. The introduction of these security networks, coupled with considerable advances in portable scanning devices for cruisers, explosive detectors, advanced equipment module, optical character recognition for vehicle plate numbers, security arcs for pedestrian access and automatic barriers for monitoring road traffic are all part of the application of the ISPS Code, providing information about events at any point of the facilities.

The coordination centre also supervises compliance of rules and regulations for the approach, organization and monitoring of maritime traffic in Santa Cruz de Tenerife Port (Provincial Official Gazette no. 176, of 28 October 2005). All vessels putting into port or navigating in any of the docks must strictly obey its orders.