Fill Is Going Into the Old Banana Docks as Port Tampa Bay Starts Its Fourth Cruise Terminal

Trucks are dumping fill into a dead-end slip off Channelside, and by late 2026 that water will be land. Port Tampa Bay began site preparation this month on its fourth cruise terminal, the first new one built at the port in more than 25 years, on the former Metroport property that Tampa old-timers still call the Banana Docks. For anyone who has sailed out of Tampa because it beats driving to Miami, this is the project that decides whether the port can keep saying yes to more ships.

Kimmins Contracting Corporation is running the first phase. The job is to fill in a defunct marine slip, restore more than five acres of usable ground and move the stormwater infrastructure that currently drains part of downtown Tampa out through this stretch of waterfront.

The numbers behind that are not small. HDR, the port's program manager and engineer of record on the land reclamation, is placing roughly 320,000 cubic yards of select fill behind a berm at the mouth of the slip to push the water out and build 5.6 acres of new land. The firm is also carrying a 1,100-foot bulkhead through design.

Why the port is building land instead of buying it

Three cruise terminals, all of them running full during peak season. That is the problem. Port officials have said publicly that Tampa has already turned away requests from cruise lines because there is simply nowhere to berth them in the winter and spring months, and there is no spare waterfront in Channelside to expand onto.

The port handled a record 1.66 million cruise passengers in 2025, according to local business reporting, and expects roughly 1.8 million and 394 ship calls this year. March alone set a record with 51 calls.

The new terminal, sited north of Cruise Terminal 6, is designed as a shared-use facility rather than one line's home port. Port President and CEO Paul Anderson said the project is an investment in the region's economy as much as in the port itself, and that the added capacity will let Tampa serve existing cruise partners while chasing new ones. Once it opens, the port projects more than 200 additional ship calls a year, more than 2 million annual passengers and about $100 million in added yearly economic impact. Local reports have put the potential price tag around $80 million.

What happens, and when

That settlement gap is the part people tend to miss. Newly made ground has to sit and compress under load before a building can go on it, so there will be a long stretch where the site looks finished and nothing appears to be happening. Engineers planned a surcharge loading strategy for exactly that reason after subsurface testing.

The design work is running in parallel

HDR, in partnership with BEA Architects, was selected to design the terminal and its parking garage. The port's board authorized negotiations on a contract worth up to $3 million for the architectural and engineering work after ranking HDR first out of six proposals. Bermello, Ajamil & Partners placed second, WJArchitects third.

Planning documents describe a facility of about 110,000 square feet handling passenger processing, parking, provisioning and landside circulation. The last time Tampa opened a cruise terminal was 2002.

One engineering wrinkle shaped a lot of the design: stormwater from parts of downtown discharges right at the project site. Routing it through the new bulkhead would have meant expensive structures, so the team went with a temporary fix now and a permanent large box culvert later, tied into a retaining structure at the north end of the slip. It also moves the discharge point away from where ships will tie up.

The port says the first renderings of the terminal should be released in the coming months. Until then, the visible progress is fill, berm and truck traffic. Details on the announcement are posted on Port Tampa Bay's site.

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Header photo: TampAGS, for AGS Media / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)