The night's anchorage in the Mediterranean gets decided before you leave the dock, not when you arrive. Across France, Spain, Italy and Croatia, the coves worth stopping in have become buoy fields you reserve, park water you hold a permit for, or seagrass the anchor may not touch. A summer run now breaks up around fixed points ashore rather than around mileage. Put those fixed points on the calendar first and the passages arrange themselves around them.
The buoy field is the anchorage now
In the Iles d'Hyeres, off the Var coast of southern France, the organised mooring zone at Bagaud carries 68 ecological buoys and opens from 15 April to 15 October. Between 8 a.m. and 6 p.m. a buoy is free and first-come. From 6 p.m. to 8 a.m. it is reservation-only, booked online, and no boat may hold one for more than five nights running.
Size decides which buoy you get, and the split is worth knowing before you commit a leg. Sixty of the 68 take boats up to 49 ft (15 m). Five take 49 to 98 ft (15 to 30 m). Three are held for island residents. One more rule catches crews out: somebody able to manoeuvre the boat has to stay aboard the whole time she is on the buoy, which changes what everyone-ashore-for-dinner means. Overnight buoys book through the national park.
Sardinia wants the permit before the passage
At the top of Sardinia, the La Maddalena archipelago requires an access authorisation covering navigation, mooring, anchoring and lying within 984 ft (300 m) of the coast anywhere inside the national park. Sort it before you sail rather than on the VHF at the entrance.
The archipelago's summer rules run 1 June to 30 September and are in force for the 2026 and 2027 seasons. Speed is capped at 7 knots within 1,640 ft (500 m) of the coast and 10 knots from there out to 3,280 ft (1,000 m), with the boat held at displacement trim. The hook goes down on sand or mud only, never on posidonia, and where there is no sand there are park buoys instead. The permit is issued online.
Four closed boxes at Corsica's southern tip
The Bouches de Bonifacio, the strait between Corsica and Sardinia, carries four closed zones inside its nature reserve: north of Lavezzi, and around the islets of Ratino, Porraggia and Perduto. Navigation, anchoring and lying stopped are all prohibited in them under a prefectural order that took effect on 31 July 2023 and runs for five years.
They sit exactly where a boat crossing the strait would most want to duck in and let a mistral blow itself out, so they belong on the chart at the planning table and not on the approach. The workaround is unglamorous and it works: choose your bolt-hole on the Corsican or the Sardinian side before you commit to the crossing, and cross on the front half of the day.
In the Balearics you moor, you don't anchor
Seven regulated buoy fields cover the busiest water in the islands: Dragonera to Sant Elm and Cap Enderrocat to Cap Blanc at Cala Blava off Mallorca, Es Calo de s'Oli and Platja de ses Salines around Ibiza and Formentera, the Badia de s'Alga at S'Espalmador, and Badia de Fornells and Illa d'en Colom to Cala Tamarells on Menorca. Inside them the instruction is one line long: make fast to a buoy, and keep the anchor on deck.
That is the shape of a modern Balearic week, a chain of reserved moorings with day-sailing in between, run out of Palma. It is also worth reading what actually changes on this coast in September before you fix the dates, because the shore calendar and the weather calendar do not turn over together.
Croatia has already gone furthest
The Kornati archipelago has environmentally friendly moorings at sixteen locations, 164 buoys in total, sized for boats up to 52 ft (16 m) and up to 85 ft (26 m). They are held by an Earthanchor system, drilled through sand and sediment into the rock beneath, rather than by concrete blocks that scour a circle into the bottom every time the wind shifts.
The direction of travel is set out plainly: moorings in all 19 designated bays, and an end to free anchoring anywhere in the park. Whatever you make of that, it is where this coastline is heading, and Croatia got there first. Plan a Kornati week as a mooring itinerary rather than an anchoring one and it becomes a straightforward, well-marked cruise.
Building a week that survives the rules
Book the nights and keep the days loose. That single habit does more for a Mediterranean itinerary than any amount of local knowledge, because the binding constraints are now calendar constraints: a reservation window, a permit season, a five-night cap, a park boundary. Weather still moves you around, but it moves you between fixed points you already hold.
It also quietly changes what boat suits the water. Length matters less than manoeuvring: you want a boat two people can pick up a mooring with in a crosswind, and a tender that does real work, because once you are on a buoy the tender is the only way ashore. A flybridge like the Princess Y72 gives a crew somewhere to spend a whole afternoon on the mooring and takes a buoy without drama. A power catamaran like the Aquila 54 Yacht comes at it from the other end, trading a deep hull for beam and shallower draft, which keeps sandy bottom within reach on the days the buoys are all taken.
Tony's Take: I reserve the moorings the week the fields open and treat everything after that as weather. The owners who have a rough Med season are nearly always the ones who planned the mileage first and the moorings second. Out here the mooring is the plan and the mileage bends to fit it. Book Bagaud and La Maddalena before you argue about which island you want to see. - Tony Smith, Founder - Minted Yachts
Planning a Mediterranean season and want a boat that fits the way this coast now works? Email TS@MintedYachts.com, call +1 (404) 805-9819, or send us your dates and we will build the run backwards from the moorings.