Bigger than the Panama: The world-beating canal few have heard of

2 weeks ago 2

Brian Johnston

September 25, 2025 — 5:00am

Fame is a funny thing. A short canal in Panama, and everybody has heard of it. A longer and busier canal in Egypt is also world renowned.

Then there’s the Kiel Canal. The what? Yes, that’s most people’s reaction to the canal competition from Germany. And yet this is the world’s busiest artificial waterway for seagoing ships, 43,000 of which transit the canal annually.

Traffic on the Kiel Canal in Germany, opened in 1895. About 43,000 ships traverse it each year.

The Kiel Canal, opened in 1895 and upgraded twice since, connects the Baltic Sea to the North Sea just south of the Danish border. You could get from one sea to the other by sailing around Denmark, but it adds 260 nautical miles (481 kilometres) and 16 more hours to the journey.

I’m on Azamara Journey, a premium cruise ship carrying 702 guests, on a cruise around the Baltic from Copenhagen. Near Kiel, I’m breakfasting on smoked salmon and omelette in Windows Café as we inch into Holtenau lock.

Azamara Journey isn’t a big cruise ship, but the fit is tight. As I sip my coffee, a bleary-eyed woman clambers out of her campervan on the shore to admire its manoeuvring.

This is a relaxed transit. The ship’s speed is limited to reduce wash and it takes all day to sail the Kiel Canal, which is just shy of 100 kilometres long.

The entrance to the canal from the Baltic.

Locals cycling along the towpaths overtake us, waving mischievously, but that’s OK. You seldom see cyclists from the deck of an ocean cruise ship. Nor plump people slumped in backyard lounge chairs, or cows wading through meadows of tall summer wildflowers.

I spend all morning on deck. We pass German and Dutch tankers and container ships. The canal isn’t wide, and we pass within metres of the world’s trade goods. I could almost lean over the railings and pluck a toaster or tins of pineapple out of the containers.

Some 20,000 pleasure yachts transit this canal each year too, although their sails are furled and they must use their motors. From the pool deck they seem small and sedate as swans. Owners peer at us from hatches.

The Azamara Journey isn’t a particularly large ship, but it’s a tight fit in the canal.

Everybody waves: yachties, walkers, anglers. Every now and then, we pass a rural beer garden under jaunty parasols, filled with Sunday lunch-goers, and they wave too. Only modestly sized cruise ships can sail the Kiel Canal, and they do so infrequently, making us a relatively unusual sight.

In a nice touch, currywurst, schnitzel and German beer circulates on the decks of Windows Café at lunch time, all part of Azamara’s effort to bring local dishes to its menus wherever we sail.

Lunchtime brings us the most interesting of the 10 bridges that span the canal. Rendsburg High Bridge for trains is especially notable for also being a transporter bridge: a suspended section of roadway slung from cables beneath carries cars across the water.

Any bridge brings excitement. On a cruise-ship deck you feel convinced until the last minute that the ship’s funnels won’t fit beneath. Indeed, Azamara Journey has taken down one of its antenna masts for the transit.

Travelling down the canal is a slow, relaxing journey.

What could be better than drifting along a canal on a summer’s day, especially from the elevated viewpoint of a cruise ship’s pool deck? Villages pass by, church spires, wheat fields, contemplative cows. The graceful curves of the canal give it the look of a rural river.

At the Kiel Canal’s eastern end, pastoral landscapes fade. A monotony of trees takes over, then factories, electricity pylons and an invading army of wind turbines: the neat, organised and impressive landscape of industrial Germany.

Brunsbüttel lock spits us out of the lock into the Elbe River, downstream from Hamburg. The Elbe here is barely a river. The bay is huge, and soon we spot sandbanks and open water, silvery in the evening light, and feel the gentle heave of the North Sea.

THE DETAILS

Cruise
Azamara’s next transit of the Kiel Canal is on a 13-night Portugal, France and Germany cruise between Lisbon and Copenhagen that departs on June 26, 2026 and costs from $6219pp. A further Northern Europe & Baltic cruise in June 2027 also sails through the canal. See azamara.com

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The writer travelled as a guest of Azamara.

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Brian Johnston seemed destined to become a travel writer: he is an Irishman born in Nigeria and raised in Switzerland, who has lived in Britain and China and now calls Australia home.