IGY Portisco Marina (Sardinia)

Where the marina actually sits

IGY's own marina-services page gives the position as 41 degrees 01 minutes 55.6 seconds north, 09 degrees 31 minutes 32.8 seconds east, at Strada Panoramica Costa Smeralda km 0,100 in the Portisco district of Olbia. PredictWind's independently compiled listing for the same marina gives 41.03511 north, 9.52324 east, which converts to a position roughly 300 to 400 metres from IGY's own figure, a small but real disagreement between the marina's own coordinates and a third-party aggregator's. Both sources and IGY's own destination copy agree on the wider picture: Portisco sits at the gateway to the Costa Smeralda, between Porto Cervo and Porto Rotondo, protected by what the marina describes as a long outer breakwater.

That location is the whole commercial logic of the place. Porto Cervo, a few minutes further round the coast, is the Costa Smeralda's headline address and, per Operation Red Jack coverage discussed below, one of the marinas the Guardia di Finanza singled out by name in its 2025-2026 tax sweep of the coast, alongside Porto Rotondo, Poltu Quatu and Cannigione. Portisco was not named in that list. Whether that reflects genuinely lighter scrutiny or simply that the sweep's public reporting did not mention it, Yotters could not establish, and says so rather than guessing. What is not in doubt is that Portisco offers Costa Smeralda depth and length, 90 m and a 10 m draught, without a Porto Cervo postcode or a Porto Cervo price.

Who actually runs it now

Megayacht News reported the acquisition on 22 October 2021, quoting Transport SAS chief executive Vittorio Taula saying the company was very happy to strengthen its position in IGY Portisco Marina alongside IGY, and IGY executive vice president of operations Kenny Jones speaking about promoting Italy as a yachting destination. The same reporting notes IGY's simultaneous acquisition of a controlling interest in Fairport Yacht Support, intended to bring crew-management and compliance services into the same network. The legal entity behind the marina, per its own contact details, remains Marina di Portisco Srl; the marina's original standalone domain, marinadiportisco.it, no longer resolves to the marina at all and now redirects to a domain registrar's parking page, one small sign of how completely the IGY rebrand has replaced the old identity online.

Camper & Nicholsons Marinas, which manages three other marinas Yotters covers elsewhere on this site (Grand Harbour Marina in Malta and Port Louis Marina), does not currently list Portisco among its managed properties on its own investor pages, despite some 2021-era trade coverage describing a prospective management role for C&N alongside IGY at the time of the deal; whatever that arrangement was, it is not reflected in either company's current public materials, and Yotters lists this marina under its current operator, IGY, rather than the name it may briefly have been expected to carry. IGY's own current site places Portisco inside a network of 24 marinas in 14 countries; a separate current IGY-sourced count gives the same network as 24 marinas in 15 countries, a discrepancy inside IGY's own materials rather than a resolved fact.

IGY's own live page says 16 megayacht slips. IGY's own 2021 acquisition announcement said 41. Both are IGY's numbers.

What a berth actually costs

The booking platform Seasy, which lists the marina without selling it through online checkout, records an average booking of EUR 145 a night and a last recorded transaction of EUR 128 a night for a 12 m vessel. Set against that, a Tripadvisor reviewer with a 12 m sailboat reports being charged EUR 219 for a single night, after calling the marina office four times and sending an email requesting an official quote and receiving only a verbal statement of availability with no price attached until he arrived. That is two structurally different kinds of source, a platform's own recorded transactions and a paying guest's account, and they do not converge on anything close to the same number for the same length of boat.

A separate figure surfaces on a berth-resale platform: a 30 m by 7.5 m slip advertised for sale, not rent, at EUR 115,000. That confirms Portisco sells long-term berths as tradeable assets in their own right, which is common practice at marinas built around resident fleets rather than pure transient trade, but it is a purchase price and tells a visiting owner nothing about what a night, a week or a season costs. Compare this with ACI's chain in Croatia, which prints a published rate to the metre for every marina it operates: Portisco's pricing model is the functional opposite, and a serious buyer should treat any number found online as a starting point for a phone call, not a number to plan a season against.

The 16-versus-41 slip count IGY does not reconcile

The live port-information panel on IGY's own marina page for Portisco currently lists Berths: 589, Megayacht Slips: 16, Max Length: 90 m, Max Draft: 10 m. Megayacht News's report of the October 2021 acquisition, sourced to IGY's own announcement at the time, described 41 slips for megayachts to 295 ft within the same 589-berth total. Both figures come from IGY. Neither figure is dated as superseding the other on the pages themselves, and no intervening announcement of a slip reduction or reconfiguration turned up in Yotters' research.

This matters more than a typo would, because a more than two-to-one gap between two operator-sourced numbers is exactly the kind of thing a broker's verbal assurance will not resolve for an owner deciding whether a specific length and draught combination is actually available in season. The practical answer is to ask the Portisco dockmaster directly, in writing, for the current slip count and the specific availability at your vessel's length and draught, and to treat both published figures as a starting range rather than a commitment either way.

The draught IGY and PredictWind cannot agree on

PredictWind's marina facilities page for Marina di Portisco states, in one summary line, a maximum draught of 10 metres, sourced to the same figure IGY and Megayacht News publish. Further down the same page's detailed facilities card, PredictWind separately lists depth at mean low water as 2 to 3 metres. Both numbers appear on the same page, for the same marina, from the same aggregator, without any note explaining whether the 10 m figure applies only at specific berths, at the entrance channel, or at high water, while the 2 to 3 m figure describes something else entirely.

Yotters could not resolve which figure a large yacht should actually plan against, and neither can a reader relying on either IGY's or PredictWind's page alone. The honest position is that a 90 m yacht with anything close to a 4 m or greater draught needs written, berth-specific confirmation from the marina before committing to Portisco as a season base, not a website figure from either source.

The yard and the new electric charger

IGY's own marina-services page describes the on-site shipyard as having operated from Dock 9 for 35 years, serving as the benchmark for technical assistance at the marina, and holding Caterpillar dealer status alongside a 110-tonne travel lift, an 85-tonne boat mover, a 10-tonne forklift and a slipway. Listed services include hauling and launching, winter storage and maintenance, engine overhaul, surveys, and interior and exterior refitting and painting, which is a materially different offer from a marina that is only a basin with a fuel dock.

In February 2025, IGY Marinas and the charging company Aqua superPower announced the installation of an Aqua 75 fast charger at Portisco, described by both companies and by the trade title Marina World as Sardinia's first electric marine charger, capable of a 20 to 90 minute recharge and explicitly aimed at enabling electric-boat day trips to the Maddalena archipelago, about 20 nautical miles north. It follows two similar Aqua 75 chargers IGY installed at its Vieux-Port de Cannes marina. This is a genuine, verifiable differentiator rather than marketing language: the specific technology, the date and the trade-press corroboration all check out independently of IGY's own announcement.

Clearing into Italy, and a tightening 2026

Law 70/2026, Italy's Legge Mare (sea enhancement law), has been in force since 10 May 2026. Its Article 26-ter, per reporting in SuperyachtNews, PG Legal and the Italian trade title Il Nautilus, requires foreign-flagged recreational craft up to 24 m owned by Italian residents or Italian legal entities, while in Italian waters, to carry proof of navigability: either a certificate from the flag state, or, failing that, an inspection and five-year attestation from an Italian notified technical body. Separately, Italy opened a new, narrower customs route in 2026, under Italian Customs and Monopolies Agency Circular 11/2026, allowing certain non-EU-flagged superyachts operating under a Yacht Engaged in Trade structure to charter for limited periods, up to 84 days a year for a Cayman Islands-registered yacht over 24 m, while keeping their primary status as a private asset.

Neither rule is Portisco-specific, and the 24 m ceiling on Article 26-ter means it does not reach a genuine superyacht by length at all. What does bear directly on the wider Costa Smeralda is Operation Red Jack, a Guardia di Finanza sweep reported by Il Sole 24 Ore and multiple Italian outlets in May 2026, which identified 100 foreign-flagged vessels worth a combined EUR 48 million, all traceable to Italian tax residents and none declared to the Italian tax authority, with potential sanctions reported as high as EUR 23 million. The ports named in that coverage were Porto Cervo, Porto Rotondo, Poltu Quatu, Cannigione and the Maddalena anchorages. Portisco does not appear in that list. An owner basing a foreign-flagged yacht in the Golfo di Cugnana in 2026 should assume the same enforcement environment applies to the whole coast, named or not, and take independent Italian tax advice rather than relying on Portisco's absence from one news cycle.

Getting there

IGY's own site and the independent journey planner Rome2Rio agree closely on the transfer time, putting it at roughly 20 to 25 minutes for the 20 km run, allowing for the Costa Smeralda's summer road traffic. Olbia is a European short-haul airport in character rather than a long-haul hub, so intercontinental owners typically route through a mainland Italian gateway such as Rome or Milan. The yacht-agent guide published by Naleia Yachting quotes a private taxi from the airport at EUR 35 to 45 for the run, or about EUR 20 from central Olbia, and describes the public-transport alternative, two bus connections and a 1.5 km walk, as impractical with luggage or crew kit.

Olbia's own port adds a second, sea-based option: year-round Tirrenia and Grimaldi Lines ferry service to Civitavecchia and Livorno on the Italian mainland, and a seasonal route to Genoa, all roughly 20 to 25 minutes from the marina by road, per general Sardinia ferry-route reporting. That makes it realistic to bring a car, spare crew or extra kit onto the island without flying, an option that matters more here than at a marina with no ferry link at all nearby.

Where to eat, and after dark

Aquamarina sits directly on the quay, built around portfront tables and known for raw seafood, oysters, caviar and a lobster pasta that draws repeat custom, per restaurant listings and reviews. IGY's own marina pages also name Gusto, a cocktail bar, Dock 3 for aperitivo, and La Dolce Vita for breakfast, all inside the marina complex, which covers a full day without a car. Five minutes away by road, per IGY's own site, San Pantaleo is known locally as the village of artists for its craft studios and its Thursday market, and offers a genuinely different, inland character to an evening than another marina restaurant terrace.

For a bigger night out, Porto Rotondo is about ten minutes away and Porto Cervo about ten to twenty minutes, both distances independently confirmed by a marina Google reviewer as well as by the general geography IGY and PredictWind both describe. Both give access to the Costa Smeralda's wider restaurant and nightlife scene, including the Piazza Azzurra events tied to the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda's regatta calendar, without requiring a Portisco berth-holder to move the boat to get to them.

What is wrong with it

The pricing gap is the largest problem: no published rate card anywhere, and third-party numbers for the same size of boat spanning EUR 128 to EUR 219 a night, over 70 percent apart, with no season, contract length or berth category published to explain it. Layered on top of that are two internal IGY contradictions, a megayacht slip count that is 16 on the current site and 41 in IGY's own 2021 acquisition announcement, and a maximum draught that is 10 m in IGY's own materials but only 2 to 3 m on PredictWind's separate mean-low-water field for the same listing. None of these are third-party rumours; they are the marina's own numbers disagreeing with themselves.

Service quality is not uniformly praised either. Alongside the strongly positive April 2024 Google review describing the marina as super protected from all quadrants, a Tripadvisor reviewer describes an hour's wait to be allowed into the basin, frozen showers, bathrooms he considered not very clean, and a price he says was never disclosed in advance despite four phone calls and an email. Regional wind data adds a further caveat to the protected from all quadrants claim: gusts of 45 to 50 knots have been recorded during mistral events in the Golfo di Cugnana near Porto Rotondo, according to Sardinia wind-sports reporting, which suggests the basin's shelter, while real, is not absolute in the way a single glowing review implies. Finally, Portisco itself was not named in the 2025-2026 Operation Red Jack tax enforcement sweep of nearby Costa Smeralda marinas, which is worth noting but not worth relying on, since Yotters could not establish whether that reflects the marina's actual enforcement exposure or simply what one set of news reports chose to list.

A chi si rivolge: An owner who wants Costa Smeralda depth and length without a Porto Cervo address, and who is prepared to get the real berth price by phone rather than online, not an owner who needs a published tariff to plan a season against before he calls.