Yacht charter Palma & Ibiza

Posidonia, and why it decides your week

Posidonia oceanica is a slow-growing seagrass that carpets much of the shallow water around the Balearics. It is protected, it is extremely slow to recover from damage, and anchoring into it is prohibited with penalties that are enforced and substantial.

In practice this means the crew cannot simply drop the hook wherever the bay looks pretty. They must identify sand, use a designated mooring buoy where one exists, or move on. There are official charts and apps showing the meadows, and any competent Balearic captain is using them constantly.

The most affected water is exactly the water people come for: Formentera’s western beaches, the Ses Illetes stretch, and much of the Ibiza south coast. Buoy fields exist and are limited in number, which in August converts into a first-come discipline that shapes what time you leave in the morning.

Mallorca or Ibiza

Mallorca — the better sailing, the better base

The north-west coast under the Serra de Tramuntana is the most dramatic coastline in the Balearics: Sa Calobra, Cala Deià, the harbour at Sóller. The east coast has the calas — narrow sandy inlets, sheltered, shallow and quiet. Add Cabrera, a national park archipelago south of the island where numbers are controlled by permit and the water is the clearest in the group.

Ibiza — the reason the fleet is here

Ibiza and Formentera in July and August are the busiest yachting water in the western Mediterranean, and that is the attraction rather than a drawback for most of the people who come. The anchorages are social rather than solitary, the beach clubs run tenders, and dinner ashore is the point of the day.

The honest recommendation is to do both, in that order. Start in Palma, work the Mallorcan coast for three or four days, cross to Ibiza for the second half. Reversing it makes the Mallorcan days feel like a wind-down; done this way the week builds.

Palma as a base

Palma is the most comprehensively equipped yachting town in the Mediterranean, and by some distance. The refit yards, the chandlery, the brokerage houses, the crew agencies and the specialist trades are all here at a density that only Antibes and Fort Lauderdale match.

For a charterer this shows up as reliability rather than glamour. Boats based in Palma tend to be well maintained because maintaining them is easy, and a problem that would end a week in a thinner market is a phone call here.

Port	Character	Best for
Club de Mar	Established, large yachts	Superyacht embarkation
Port de Mallorca	Central, walk to town	Most charters
Port Adriano	Modern, south-west coast	Quieter departures
Marina Ibiza / Botafoch	Ibiza town	Second-half embarkation

Palma airport is fifteen minutes from the port and is one of the busiest in Spain in summer, with direct connections across northern Europe. It is a genuinely easy place to assemble a party.

Charter licence and Spanish tax

A yacht chartering commercially in Balearic waters requires the appropriate Spanish charter licence. This is not optional and it is checked. A yacht offered to you for a Balearic charter without one is a yacht that can be stopped, with your week aboard her.

Spain also levies a registration tax — the matriculation tax — on vessels registered or used in Spain, from which commercially chartered yachts may be exempt subject to conditions. The interaction between that exemption and the charter licence is the single most technical part of the Spanish regime, and it is the operator’s responsibility rather than yours.

What is yours is to ask the question. We confirm licence status in writing before a Balearic contract is signed, on every occasion, and we would encourage the same of anyone booking elsewhere.

What it costs

Between Greece and France — more expensive than the Aegean, less than the Côte d’Azur, with an August peak that is sharper here than almost anywhere because of Ibiza demand.

The Advance Provisioning Allowance is the conventional thirty per cent. Berthing in Ibiza town in August is among the most expensive in the Mediterranean and will move the APA noticeably if the itinerary spends nights alongside there rather than at anchor.

Spanish VAT applies to the charter fee. As everywhere, it should be a separate stated line confirmed in the contract.

Cabrera, and the permit nobody mentions

Cabrera is a small archipelago about ten miles south of Mallorca, protected as a national park, and it holds the clearest water in the Balearics by a wide margin. It is also the stop most often missing from a Balearic itinerary, for one administrative reason.

Access is controlled. Vessels require an authorisation, numbers are capped, and overnight stays use a limited field of park moorings rather than anchors — the same seagrass logic that governs the rest of the islands, applied more strictly. In July and August the allocation goes quickly.

The consequence is that Cabrera has to be planned weeks ahead rather than decided over breakfast. A good operator raises it during the itinerary conversation; a merely adequate one mentions it on the Tuesday, when it is too late. Ask about it explicitly at booking.

What to take, and what not to

The Balearics reward sail more than most of the western Mediterranean. The afternoon sea breeze is reliable, the passages between islands are the right length, and the anchorages are large enough to manoeuvre in. A sailing yacht or a performance catamaran here is a pleasure rather than a compromise.

Against that, weigh the mooring-buoy reality. Where a buoy field governs the best anchorages, arriving early matters, and a yacht that will not make eight knots against a sea breeze is a yacht arriving second. That is the one argument that consistently pushes us back towards power for a party set on the busiest spots in August.

Questions