Christopher Columbus replica ship is touring the UK — and we climbed aboard

A new attraction has hit UK waterways, and this one floats: a replica of Christopher Columbus’s flagship vessel.

The Nao Santa Maria has dropped anchor in London’s St Katharine Docks and opened its… gangplank to visitors on May 29th. You'll be able to visit until June 8th — and we climbed the rigging to give you a view of what to expect as it tours the UK's ports and docks this summer.

Tickets cost £10 for adults, £5 for under 10 year-olds, and a family ticket of two adults and three kids costs £25. Under fives go free, and timed ticket slots for each date it's on our shores can be found at tickets.naosantamaria.org — at onsite at any of its destination docks.

The Nao Santa Maria is a 28m-long ship that took 14 months to build by a team of shipbuilding experts and historian consultants, and was first launched in March 2018. Though it's not the legendary 500-year-old ship itself, it's designed to be as close to the original as possible, based on historical record and painstaking reconstruction.

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That original was the flagship among Christopher Columbus’s fleet and, in the late 15th century, was shipwrecked off the coast of what is today known as Haiti. Parts of its hull were then used to help construct a fort, Fuerte Navidad, credited as the first Spanish settlement in the Americas (or the New World as it would have been called back then.)

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It was a sight to behold at London's beautiful St Katherine's dock, with some rare London sunshine adding to the sense of a sun-soaked adventure on the high sees when we visited during its UK debut weekend. A self-guided visit of the Nao Santa Maria and its four accessible decks lasts about an hour, with the ship acting as a “floating museum” designed to take you back through the centuries, aided by QR-code enabled audio information.

You get a real sense of the claustrophobia these months-long ocean crossings must have evoked, with the ship kitted out to reflect what its working living quarters and cabins would have felt like in its historical heydey. And for kids who yawn at the thought of the slightest whiff of a history lesson, there's a skeletal easter egg to be found in one of the ships corners...

Fundacion Nao Victoria operates several of these historical replicas, which sail across the UK (and elsewhere), between stints opening up as a museum.

The Nao Santa Maria drops into Jersey on May 17th-18th, will be at Southend-on-Sea from July 2th to July 6th, and at Great Yarmouth from July 9th to July 20th.