Astondoa

Five generations from a Basque boatshed

Astondoa was founded in 1916 by brothers Jesus and Jose Astondoa Martinez, who started out building rowboats and traineras, the traditional Basque racing boats, from a small carpentry workshop in Portugalete, on the Nervion estuary that also runs through Bilbao. The Spanish Civil War shut the yard down between 1936 and 1939. Jesus Astondoa Santamaria, the founder's son, took the business over in 1944 and kept it building fishing boats and small pleasure craft through the postwar decades. His son moved the whole operation south in 1978, from the Basque coast to Santa Pola, near Alicante, to sit closer to the center of the Spanish Mediterranean leisure market, and the yard switched from wood to polyester and fiberglass construction in the early 1980s as Spain's coastal tourism boom took hold.

That move put Astondoa where it still builds today. The company now runs three production sites: Santa Pola, the main yard on the seafront at Muelle de Poniente, handles yachts longer than 120 feet, Gador builds the smaller Faeton range from 23 to 36 feet, and Almansa builds Astondoa models under 52 feet alongside the group's furniture division. Astondoa says more than 3,000 hulls have left its yards across its history, a figure that spans everything from the original wooden traineras to the current motor yacht range, and the business remains family controlled four generations after the two brothers started it.

The Century range, a 100th birthday that produced a flagship

In 2016, marking a hundred years since the Portugalete workshop opened, Astondoa launched the Century range, a family of raised pilothouse tri-deck motor yachts built to sit above the semi-custom flybridge, coupe and As series that make up most of its production. The line now runs from the 100 Century up through the 110 Century and 125 Century, alongside a separate steel-hulled explorer and megayacht range that Astondoa also builds at Santa Pola for owners wanting aluminum superstructure and greater range. The Century boats are designed in house rather than commissioned from an outside naval architecture studio, with the yard's own team, led by Jesus Astondoa Diaz de Otazu, credited on delivered hulls, while owners typically bring in an outside name, most often the Italian designer Cristiano Gatto, for the interior.

Astondoa's reputation outside Spain is mixed and worth stating plainly rather than glossing over. Owners and brokers on forums such as YBW rate the smaller production models, the 39 through 52 foot range built decades ago, as solidly built but a step behind Ferretti, Princess or Fairline on finish, and a 2015 thread on YachtForums recorded gelcoat cracking on a roughly five-year-old 2010-built Astondoa that an independent surveyor flagged as possibly cosmetic rather than structural. None of that specific complaint history attaches to the newer, much larger and separately engineered Century range covered here, and no equivalent independent long-term report yet exists for a 100 Century hull, but a buyer researching the brand should know the older production boats have drawn that kind of scrutiny.