The Lavezzi islands look like someone scattered a bag of granite boulders into impossibly clear water and walked away. They sit about 6 nautical miles southeast of Bonifacio, a low cluster of pale rocks and sandy coves at the edge of the strait, and on a calm day the anchorages there are as good as anything in the Mediterranean. They are also a strictly regulated nature reserve, and the rules are not suggestions. Get them right and you have one of the best afternoons of your cruise. Get them wrong and you will meet a ranger, or worse, leave a scar on a seabed that is already under pressure.
Why It Is Protected
The Lavezzi archipelago has been a nature reserve since 1982 and forms part of the wider Bouches de Bonifacio reserve, which carries reinforced protection over the most sensitive zones. The reason is the seabed as much as the rocks: the coves are floored with posidonia, the slow-growing seagrass that anchors the whole Mediterranean ecosystem and takes decades to recover from a single dragging anchor. The clear water you came to enjoy is clear because the meadows are healthy. Anchoring carelessly on them is how you destroy the thing you sailed out to see.
The Rules That Actually Apply
There are a handful of rules that matter to a visiting boat, and they are worth knowing precisely rather than vaguely.
Your boat must be under 24 metres to anchor in the reserve at all. Above that length you are not permitted to anchor here.
You may only anchor within the defined, buoyed zones. There are seven of them around the archipelago, marked out by buoys, and you anchor inside those and nowhere else. Dropping the hook outside the marked areas is prohibited.
You may not anchor within 40 metres of the shore. That keeps boats off the shallowest, most fragile seagrass and the swimming areas.
You may not anchor on posidonia. Even inside the permitted zones, you find a patch of clear sand and drop on that. This is the single most important habit to build, and it applies across all of French waters now under the posidonia protections, not just here. If you are not yet in the habit of reading the seabed before you let go, my notes on the posidonia anchoring ban in France explain why it has become a legal as well as an environmental matter.
There are also no-take zones where fishing is banned, and areas where motorboats are restricted. The exact diagrams are set by decree of the maritime prefect of the Mediterranean (the prefet maritime), and they can be tightened from year to year, so check the current decree before you go rather than relying on an old guide.
The Mooring Buoys and the Day-Boat Rhythm
Some of the coves have mooring buoys, but here is the catch: most of them are reserved for the commercial tripper boats that run out from Bonifacio. During the day those buoys are working buoys, and a private yacht should not be sitting on one when a tour boat needs it.
The rhythm of the place is worth understanding. The day boats arrive through the morning and operate until the afternoon, and after roughly four in the afternoon they head back to Bonifacio. In the evening, once the tour boats have gone, visiting yachts sometimes take a vacated buoy for the night. If you do, the unwritten rule is that you vacate it early the next morning, before the trip boats return. Rangers typically check around mid-morning that private boats are not still occupying the tour buoys. Treat the buoys as borrowed, not yours, and you will not have a problem.
When in doubt, anchor properly on sand within a buoyed zone rather than chancing a buoy, and you sidestep the whole question.
How the Rangers Check
This is not a place where the rules are written and ignored. The reserve is patrolled, and rangers do come round to check boat lengths, anchoring positions and the use of the tour buoys. They are generally reasonable with visitors who are clearly trying to do the right thing, and far less so with boats anchored on seagrass, sitting on a tour buoy at ten in the morning, or tucked within the 40 metre line. A fine is a real possibility. So is being asked to move on a perfect afternoon, which is its own kind of penalty.
The simplest way to stay on the right side of it is to arrive knowing the rules, anchor on sand inside a marked zone outside the 40 metre line, and behave as if you are a guest in a fragile place, because you are.
When to Go and What to Expect
The Lavezzi reward calm weather and an early or late visit. In the middle of a summer day the buoyed coves are busy with tour boats and the swimming is crowded; in the early morning or the evening, with the day traffic gone, you can have a cove almost to yourself with water the colour of a swimming pool over white sand.
Weather is the real gatekeeper. The islands sit at the edge of the strait, exposed to the swell that the southwesterly libeccio drives in and to the chop that the mistral builds, and the anchorages that are idyllic in a flat calm become untenable in a blow. This is the same exposure that makes the Bouches de Bonifacio strait such a serious piece of water, and the same forecast discipline applies. Pick a settled day with under 15 knots and no swell signature, and the Lavezzi are a paradise. Push it on a marginal forecast and they are a lee shore studded with rocks.
Getting the Anchoring Right in Practice
Knowing the rules and applying them in clear water with a swell running are two different things, so a few practical habits help. The seagrass shows as dark patches on the seabed and the sand shows as bright turquoise, and from the bow on a calm day you can read the bottom easily down to ten metres or more. Position the boat over a clear sand patch before you drop, not after, and watch the chain lie so it is not sweeping across a meadow as the boat swings.
Polarised sunglasses make this far easier, and so does sending someone forward to con you onto the sand while you handle the helm slowly. The 40 metre line off the shore is generous for a reason: the inner water is the shallowest and most fragile, and it is also where the swimmers are. Anchoring well out and dinghying in keeps you clear of both problems.
If the swell is running into your chosen cove, do not fight it. The Lavezzi have several coves facing different directions, so pick the one in the lee of the day's wind and swell rather than the prettiest one in the photographs. A rolly anchorage over an exposed seabed is exactly where anchors drag and damage gets done.
What to Bring Ashore, and What to Leave
You can land on the Lavezzi islands themselves, unlike the strictly off-limits Scandola reserve further north, and there are marked paths among the rocks and two small cemeteries that tell the story of the Semillante, the frigate wrecked here in 1855 with the loss of every soul aboard. It is a sobering walk and a reminder of why the strait earns its reputation. Take your litter back to the boat, stay on the paths, and leave the rocks and the wildlife as you found them. The reserve is a privilege extended to visitors who behave, and it stays open because most of them do.
Fitting the Lavezzi into Your Cruise
For most visitors the Lavezzi are a day trip from Bonifacio, and they pair naturally with a night in that extraordinary harbour, which I have described in the Bonifacio harbour arrival guide. Berth in Bonifacio, watch the weather, and on the right morning slip out southeast to the islands, returning before the evening breeze.
They also sit neatly in the wider loop of the island. In the Corsica circumnavigation itinerary the Lavezzi come right after the run down the west coast and before the turn up the east, and they are the kind of place you build a slack day around, because the whole point of them is to do nothing in extraordinary water. Just remember whose water it is, anchor on sand, stay off the seagrass, and leave the buoys for the boats that depend on them.
