Following the recent transition in the high performance computing landscape to more heterogeneous architectures, application developers are faced with the challenge of ensuring good performance across a diverse set of platforms. In this paper, we present our work on porting the spectral element code Nek5000 to the recent vector architecture SX-Aurora TSUBASA. Using Nek5000's mini-app Nekbone, we formulate suitable loop transformations in key kernels, allowing for better vectorization, increasing the baseline performance by a factor of six. Using the new transformations, we demonstrate that the main compute intensive matrix-vector and matrix-matrix multiplication kernels achieves close to half the peak performance of a SX-Aurora core. Our work also addresses the gather-scatter operations, a key kernel for efficient matrix-free spectral element formulation. We introduce a new implementation of Nek5000's gather-scatter library with mesh topology awareness for improved vectorization via exploitation of the SX-Aurora's hardware gather-scatter instructions, improving performance with up to 116%. A detailed description of the implementation is given together with a performance study, comparing both single node performance and strong scalability characteristics, running across multiple SX-Aurora cards.