Dentro del crucero más grande del mundo

Inside the World's Largest Cruise Ship January 2024. A behemoth, longer than the Eiffel Tower if placed sideways, slowly pulls away from the port of Miami. Nearly ten thousand people are aboard. More than the entire population of some Caribbean islands. And each of them will spend a week inside a marvel of engineering, so cleverly concealed that almost no one on board will even suspect its existence. Because behind the water slides, the pools that seem to stretch to the horizon, and the twenty luxurious decks, a crew of 2,350 works. And they don't just serve cocktails. They maintain control of something whose complexity is more akin to that of a nuclear submarine than a vacation. Its own power plant. Its own freshwater source. Its own hospital with operating rooms. And a wastewater treatment system that produces water cleaner than what some countries are allowed to discharge into their rivers on land. This is the Icon of the Seas. Two billion dollars. 250,800 tons. 365 meters long and twenty decks high: it's like putting a twenty-story building on the water and forcing it to sail. Almost all the onboard systems are designed to perform at least two tasks simultaneously. Let's start with a component that ten thousand passengers pass by every day. None of them imagine that it's precisely what prevents the deck above their heads from collapsing.