Your yacht management firm
on the French Riviera.

The French Riviera is the global yachting nerve centre: the concentration of private superyachts here is higher than anywhere else in the Mediterranean, the season stretches from May to October, and the infrastructure — ports, shipyards, suppliers, crew — forms a dense and demanding ecosystem. For an owner, operating a yacht here means benefiting from the best European setting; it also means dealing with high operational pressure and a level of quality that tolerates no approximation.

Cursorio is a local yacht management firm, anchored on the French Riviera for years. This proximity is not a marketing gimmick: it translates concretely into the ability to be on board within 30 minutes from Le Cannet for an entry audit, to visit a shipyard in Antibes or La Ciotat within the day, to meet a supplier in Cannes or Monaco without friction. When your yachts travel — Caribbean in winter, Adriatic in summer, Balearics in season — we keep the rhythm through a curated network of local agents.

Our portfolio remains deliberately selective: a handful of vessels followed for the long term, rather than a broad list of lightly-monitored mandates. This is, in our view, the only way to sustain the operational discipline and the level of proximity private owners and family offices expect of superyacht management on the 50-metre-plus segment.

Since framework order no. 123/2019 issued by the Maritime Prefect of the Mediterranean, anchoring by vessels of 24 metres and over is prohibited in Posidonia seagrass meadows — a species protected since 1988 — throughout French Mediterranean waters. Departmental orders map the no-anchoring zones off Cannes, Golfe-Juan, Antibes, Nice and Villefranche, with thresholds lowered to 20 metres on part of the Alpes-Maritimes coast.

For the largest units, the reinforced regime introduced in 2022 — carried today by order no. 157/2024 of 23 May 2024, covering vessels of 45 metres and over, or 300 GT and over — goes further: the rules apply to the vessel being stopped, not merely anchored; the former "preferred" zones have become mandatory zones subject to authorisation; and stopping under dynamic positioning is capped at two hours. Anchoring that destroys the seagrass constitutes an environmental offence — with criminal penalties of up to €150,000. This is precisely the kind of constraint yacht management absorbs: authorisation requests, monitoring of prefectural orders, briefing the captain before each zone.

A sign of where things are heading: the Pampelonne ZMEL, in service since June 2025 — 210 buoys, 60 of them reserved for superyachts up to 80 metres, on moorings that never touch the seagrass. Free anchoring is receding; organised, paid, reservable moorings are becoming the norm in the emblematic bays.

Harbour masters — usual working channels: Port Vauban (Antibes) VHF 9 · Vieux-Port de Cannes VHF 12 · Port Canto VHF 9 · Port Hercule (Monaco) VHF 12, watch kept 24/7 · Saint-Tropez VHF 9 · Port of Nice VHF 9 (yachting) and 12 (state harbour master). Verified at the time of publication — always confirm before approach.