A former banana warehouse recently became the Port of Galveston’s third cruise terminal to win a prestigious regional architecture award from the Houston Business Journal.
Cruise Terminal 16, shared by the MSC and Norwegian cruise lines, was singled out for a Landmark Award in HBJ’s Special Projects category. The awards, which honor outstanding projects and individuals in Houston’s commercial real estate industry, were announced last week at Uptown’s Amegy Tower.
Completed in 18 months, the $156 million project converted a 1960s-era warehouse facility into a 165,000-square-foot terminal building—turning loading bays into large windows—and a seven-story parking garage made of precast concrete. It also earned a LEED Silver certification from the U.S. Green Building Council by reusing roughly 85 percent of the existing structural elements and incorporating other sustainability features such as limited outdoor lighting and indoor water usage.
According to the port, the new terminal is designed to handle 17,000 passengers and crew members on cruise days. Since opening last November, the facility has created an additional 1,000 jobs and boosted the island’s economy by $138 million, port director and CEO Rodger Rees said in a news release.
“Building this fourth terminal allowed us to welcome two of the world’s major international cruise lines–MSC and Norwegian–to Galveston, giving our 46-million-person drive-to market two more great cruise vacation options,” Rees said. “It also meets cruise industry needs for future growth and the port’s mission to be a major economic engine for business and jobs growth.”
The new terminal has also increased the port’s projections for 2026 to 445 sailings and 3.9 passenger movements (or embarkations and debarkations), the port said—and all this before Carnival’s 6,600-capacity Tropicale debuts in spring 2028.
The port previously won Landmark Awards in 2024 for its $53 million renovation of Terminal 25 and the previous year for Terminal 10, a LEED Zero Energy project built in partnership with Royal Caribbean.