Santa Ponsa sits on one of Mallorca’s great sailing bays — sheltered water, steady summer breezes, and two very different marinas within a few minutes of each other. To understand this coast, you have to see it from the water.
Two marinas, two moods
The Club Nàutic Santa Ponsa is the local heart of it. Built in 1975 in Sa Caleta — the same cove where Jaume I came ashore in 1229 — it moors several hundred boats and runs the easy, year-round sailing life that gives the town its rhythm.
A short drive west, below the cliffs of El Toro, is something else entirely. Port Adriano opened in 2012 after a roughly €90-million rebuild led by the marina group Ocibar, with its commercial quarter designed by Philippe Starck. Starck described a port as a village where the piers are the streets — and it shows: low wooden buildings, sculptural mooring bollards and lamps, and berths built for yachts up to around 80 metres, making it one of the few marinas on the island that can take the largest boats afloat.
More than a marina
Around the water, Port Adriano has filled with restaurants, bars and design boutiques — somewhere between a harbour and an open-air lifestyle quarter, busy through the season with concerts and regattas like the Multihull Cup. You don’t need a yacht to enjoy it: lunch on the quay, a sunset drink, the slow parade of boats coming and going. And some of the island’s best golf is about five minutes away.
Out on the water
From either marina, the southwest opens up. Sailing routes run to the Illes Malgrats off Santa Ponsa, west to the pine-fringed coves of Cala Fornells and Camp de Mar, and on to Sa Dragonera — the uninhabited island and protected nature park at Mallorca’s southwest tip. It is some of the most rewarding day-sailing in the Mediterranean, and it begins at the end of the street.
A base on this coast, shared
El Mirador, the renovated villa in Santa Ponsa, sits minutes from both marinas, with the whole of this coast on your doorstep. Keep a boat, charter for the day, or just watch the bay from the terrace.
