Port Vauban / IYCA (Antibes)

The approach and the entrance

Port Vauban sits on the eastern side of the Antibes peninsula, tucked under the ramparts and the Fort Carre at the top of the Baie des Anges. The approach from seaward is clean, with the entry lit day and night and access possible in most conditions. The channel itself is narrow by superyacht standards at about 50 metres wide, and the speed limit through the entrance and the basins is three knots. Depth at the entrance runs from around five to eight metres.

The weakness is the east. The main stone breakwater covers the port from northerly swell, and the Vauban tower shelters the inner harbour, but the entrance is open to the eastern sector and a strong easterly makes the approach awkward and the outer berths lively. Captains coming in from Corsica or Italy in a blow will often hold off or divert. Inside the basins the depths drop to two to four metres, which is the single most important fact about the port. A yacht over about 30 metres is not going anywhere except the outer wall.

What the port holds and where a large yacht goes

Port Vauban is quoted at a capacity of 1,500 berths, taking everything from small local craft upwards, and it is that mix that gives the place its working character. Almost all of that number is irrelevant to a large-yacht owner. The berths that matter are on the outer breakwater run by the International Yacht Club d'Antibes, the quay everyone calls the Quai des Milliardaires, created in 1986 specifically to take yachts of 50 metres and up.

The IYCA quay currently runs 650 metres out to sea and holds nineteen permanent berths, with a published expansion project that would take it to 1,250 metres. The layout is precise and worth knowing before enquiring. There are seven positions of 70 by 16 metres, four of 80 by 18, six of 90 by 20, one of 150 by 28 and one of 165 by 40. Maximum draught on the outer quay is quoted at five to eight metres.

Nineteen berths on the outer wall, and every one of them is a lease that expires in December 2042.

The berthing reality in season

Yachts lie stern-to along the breakwater. The old arrangement of ground chains and mooring buoys has been replaced by a mooring-box system installed during the recent works, which removes the chain-fouling and buoy-hunting that used to make manoeuvring here slow. Berthing assistance is provided and the tight channel means arrivals are coordinated with the port.

Availability in July and August is effectively nil at the permanent positions, because all nineteen are held under long leases by owners who use them. What moves is stopover space when a leaseholder is away, and that is allocated by the club and the port. An owner planning a Riviera summer without a lease should assume Antibes is a place he visits by arrangement, not a berth he can call on.

What a berth here actually is, and how it is bought

The French system is different from Monaco's and the difference decides the money. Port Vauban is run under a delegation of public service, and since 1 January 2017 the concession has been held by Vauban 21, a company formed by the local chamber of commerce with the Caisse des Depots and Caisse d'Epargne Cote d'Azur. That concession runs 25 years, to December 2042. A berth lease on the quay is a right of use that expires with the concession, so what an owner buys is a wasting asset with a known end date and no guaranteed renewal.

Leases change hands privately, usually through a small circle of berth brokers and the major brokerage houses. Reported figures for 50 metre-plus positions on the quay have run into eight figures, with EUR 10 million to over EUR 20 million cited in 2026 market commentary, and one smaller superyacht berth was publicly listed at EUR 4,150,000 including VAT with the payment spread over eighteen years. Those are asking prices in a market with a handful of transactions, so treat them as a range. Below the breakwater, annual and seasonal contracts in the public port are handled directly by Vauban 21.

Power, fuel, waste and crew

The quay carries water and electricity, a fuel station and a pumping station with waste collection. The recent EUR 135 million redevelopment rebuilt the IYCA district to a design by the Philippe Prost architecture studio and added the things a large crew actually uses. There is a dedicated crew centre with a lounge, gym and changing rooms, a members' lounge bar with about 700 square metres of terrace, electric golf carts for moving people and stores along a 650 metre quay, and a concierge desk.

Security on the breakwater is controlled private access with CCTV, which puts the yacht behind a gate and away from the public promenade that runs through the rest of the port. There is a licensed heliport on the quay measuring roughly 28 by 29 metres with day and night landing authorisation and four helicopter parking spaces. Membership at the club is tiered, and the tier an owner takes determines what he can use ashore.

The trade base, which is the real reason to be here

Antibes holds the densest concentration of yacht crew, crew agencies, brokerages and marine trades anywhere in the world, and it is walking distance from the quay. Anything an owner needs done in a week, from an engineer to a varnish team to a chef at four hours' notice, can be found in the old town behind the port. That depth is why so many yachts are managed out of Antibes even when they berth elsewhere.

For work on the yacht itself, Monaco Marine's Antibes yard sits on the port at about 16,000 square metres and handles more than 230 vessels a year, though its lift range covers roughly 5 to 45 metres. Anything larger goes along the coast. La Ciotat, about ninety minutes west, carries MB92 and Compositeworks and the heavy lifting capacity for yachts up to 100 metres and beyond. An owner based in Antibes has the trades on his doorstep and the big yards within a day's steaming.

The town and what a family does for a week

Antibes is a real town with a life outside yachting, which is unusual on this coast. The old town behind the ramparts has a covered Provencal market that runs most mornings, the Picasso museum in the Chateau Grimaldi sits on the sea wall a few minutes from the quay, and the beaches of the Cap and Juan-les-Pins are a short drive. Juan-les-Pins supplies the summer nightlife. Cannes is twenty minutes west, Nice twenty minutes east, and the hill villages behind the coast fill an afternoon.

Nice Cote d'Azur airport is about twenty minutes from the quay in normal traffic, with full private-jet handling and long-haul connections, which makes Antibes the easiest large-yacht base on the coast for guests flying in. Hotels near the port are good but not at the Monaco level. Families tend to use the yacht as the accommodation and the town as the shore base.

The season and the weeks that fill it

The Riviera pattern applies. The port builds from May, runs hard through July and August and holds into September. The fixed date that shapes the local calendar is the Cannes Yachting Festival, running 8 to 13 September in 2026 across the Vieux Port and Port Canto, which pulls yachts along this stretch of coast and tightens space either side of it. Monaco's show follows a fortnight later.

Unlike the resort ports, Antibes does not empty. Several thousand crew live in the town year-round, the brokerages and agencies work through the winter, and the port stays occupied while yachts prepare and stand down. Winter berthing is genuinely obtainable and reasonably priced. The redevelopment programme continues through 2026 with three new buildings and a recycling point scheduled, so an owner should expect construction activity somewhere in the port.

The honest downside

The lease is the problem. Every euro spent on a berth here runs out in December 2042 unless the city renews on terms nobody can predict, and there is no freehold to fall back on. Owners paying eight figures are buying roughly sixteen remaining years of use as things stand in 2026, and the resale market is thin enough that a forced sale would be slow.

The port itself has honest flaws too. It is open to the east and uncomfortable in a strong easterly. The inner basins are shallow and busy with small craft. It is a working harbour with the noise and traffic of one, and the public quays are genuinely public. An owner who wants a manicured resort marina will find Antibes rough at the edges compared with Porto Cervo or Yalikavak.

Shore power, and the cable rules that go with it

The port's 2026 tariff document states the supply plainly, which is rare. Port Vauban is fed at 230 V plus or minus 10 per cent, 50 Hz single-phase, or 400 V plus or minus 10 per cent, 50 Hz three-phase, through standard-compliant sockets. There is no 60 Hz supply, so a 60 Hz yacht converts on board. The document goes further and specifies the cable: one flexible cable per socket, in a single length of no more than 25 m, type HO7 RN-F at 3G2.5 for a 16 A socket and 3G6 or 5G6 for a 32 A socket. It also warns in writing that without an isolation transformer on board, electrolysis can damage the yacht or her neighbours, which is the port saying that galvanic corrosion here is the owner's problem and not the port's.

Fluids for a yacht of 12 m and over are billed on actual consumption where there is an individual metered connection, and on a flat rate where there is not. Metered, water is EUR 3.79 per cubic metre and electricity EUR 0.38 per kilowatt hour, both with VAT included, on the 2026 schedule. A yacht lived aboard without electricity metering pays a 10 per cent surcharge on the berthing fee itself, not on the power. Water is rounded up to the whole cubic metre. Hoses and cables are supplied by the yacht, and the water tap must be self-closing.

The published tariff, and the season that is not July

Port Vauban publishes a full superyachting tariff and it is banded by length and beam together, in sixteen categories from Z-QDM at 53.99 m and 12 m of beam up to Z15 at 158.99 m and 27 m. Beam is a hard cap in each band, so a wide hull moves up a category regardless of her length. The surprise is the season structure. High season at Antibes is May, June and September, not July and August, and the rates say so. A category Z05 berth, up to 85.99 m and 17 m of beam, costs EUR 3,479 a day with VAT in May, June and September against EUR 3,163 in July and August and EUR 1,582 in low season. Category Z08, to 106.99 m and 20 m, runs EUR 4,718, EUR 4,289 and EUR 2,253. Category Z15 runs EUR 7,434, EUR 6,758 and EUR 3,833. Low season is 1 January to 1 May and 1 October to 1 January.

Two discounts sit under those headline numbers. In July and August a yacht in category Z03 or above staying fifteen consecutive nights or more is discounted 30 per cent on the high-season rate. And a winter contract, available for stays of one month or more, prices the same berths far lower: EUR 331 a day with VAT for Z-QDM, EUR 1,299 for Z07 up to 99.99 m and 19 m of beam, EUR 2,319 for Z15. Worked through, a 100 m yacht on a 19 m beam sitting on the Quai Camille Rayon from 1 October to 1 May pays 212 days at EUR 1,299, or EUR 275,388 for the winter, before metered water and power. The same yacht alongside for a week in June pays EUR 4,288 a day, or EUR 30,016. Cancellation terms are strict enough to matter: a stay of ten nights or fewer cancelled inside 72 hours of arrival is charged in full.

Who it is for: An owner who runs the yacht hard and wants the world's deepest crew and service base within walking distance of the passerelle.