Carnival Cruise Line’s newest destination — Celebration Key — is still about two years from welcoming its first passengers. Given the timeline, while the cruise line has released some general information about the private spot, lots of details have yet to be announced.
For instance, we know Celebration Key will be located on the coast of Grand Bahama Island. The port will be able to host two Excel-class ships (Carnival’s current largest type of ship) at once. We also know there will be a mile-long beach, shopping, dining, and shore excursions available. (For more on what we know so far about Celebration Key, see this post.)
But it’s a new rendering released that has us wondering if Carnival might be building one of the largest swimming pools in the world.
In a press release announcing the opening of bookings to Celebration Key starting in July 2025, Carnival also included a rendering of the destination we had yet to see.
Take a look:
As you can see, there’s a lot to digest. Starting with the pier on the left side of the image, we can see the massive stretch of beach with blue water. There are cabanas, a main welcome plaza, and a large children’s splash pad.
What caught our attention, however, is the massive pool that seems to stretch nearly as long as the beach itself. It’s surrounded by loads of seating, palm trees, and a number of buildings.
In fact, Carnival mentioned this “lagoon” in its press release when it said, “The destination’s features and offerings will be anchored around the largest freshwater lagoons in the Caribbean that will offer numerous recreational and leisure activities for both families and adults.”
That made us look a little closer at just exactly what Carnival seems to have planned… and it looks big.
Renderings Show a Massive Pool for Cruise Passengers
To be sure, the cruise line hasn’t released any information we’ve seen specifically about the pool area. And in the previous quote, it mentions “lagoons” implying that there are multiple, which could mean what appears to be one large pool may not be continuous.
Even so, signs seem to point to the construction of an enormous pool complex that could possibly rival some of the largest on the planet.
We dug into Carnival’s website on the construction of Celebration Key. There, the cruise line outlines a a few details about the planning and building of the destination.
Searching through the site, we found a page calling for contractors and vendors to submit proposals to work on the construction. Within these RFPs (requests for proposals) we spotted a simple rendering of an overhead shot of Celebration Key:
There’s very little detail, but it does show two ships docked and a massive pool. Now this is by no means a final rendering, but it can give some hints as to the size using the ships for scale.
Here, two Carnival ships are shown. While we can’t make out if they are a specific class of ship, most ships in the Carnival fleet measure between 950 feet to 1,150 feet. Using an estimation of 1,000 feet for the ships in the image, we can get a ballpark idea of just how large the pool shown actually is.
By our estimates, based on the size of the ships, this scale would make the pool nearly 1,700 feet in length — nearly five football fields long!
If that’s the case and it’s one continuous pool, that would put the spot on Celebration Key within striking distance of some of the largest pools on the planet.
The largest pool in surface area is the Citystars Sharm El Sheikh, located in Egypt. That pool comes in at roughly 2,500 feet in length, but more than one million square feet. The largest pool in the United States is Epperson Lagoon in Florida at roughly 1,500 feet and an area of about 30,000 square feet.
It has yet to be seen just how large the new pool at Celebration Key will actually be, but it seems clear that Carnival has something large in mind for guests.
More on Celebration Key:
- Carnival Reveals Name for New $200 Million Private Destination
- Carnival “Grand Port” Project: What We Know (And Don’t!) About the New Destination
