Port-Cros is the kind of place that makes you understand why France started fencing off bits of its coast. It is the greenest of the Hyeres islands, almost entirely forested, with no cars, a single tiny harbour and water so clear that the underwater snorkelling trail needs no signs once you are in it. It is also the most tightly regulated anchorage I have visited anywhere in Europe, and the rules change often enough that arriving with last year's pilot book is a good way to get a ranger alongside before lunch.
I am writing this after a season of cruising the islands and reading the park's own leaflets rather than the forum chatter, because most of what circulates about Port-Cros is out of date. Here is how the marine rules actually work in 2026, and how to plan a visit that the park will welcome rather than fine.
Why the rules exist
Port-Cros became a national park in 1963, the first marine and terrestrial park in Europe. The seabed around it is carpeted in Posidonia oceanica, the slow-growing seagrass that France now protects across the whole Mediterranean coast. An anchor dragged through a meadow gouges a furrow that takes a century to heal, and a single big yacht swinging on its chain can scour a circle the size of a tennis court. That is the reasoning behind every restriction below, and it helps to keep it in mind when the regulations feel inconvenient.
The blanket national rule is the backdrop: vessels over 24 metres are banned from anchoring over seagrass anywhere on this coast, with fines that have reached 150,000 euros. Inside the Port-Cros park the limits are stricter still.
The boat-length limits
This is the part most visiting skippers get wrong, so read it twice.
The marine core of the park bans anchoring altogether for vessels over 30 metres. Between roughly 12 and 30 metres you are not allowed to drop your own anchor in the regulated zones; you must pick up one of the park's mooring buoys instead. Since 2022 the buoy requirement has applied to boats over 12 metres in the Bagaud mooring area, which is the main one. In practice that means a typical cruising yacht of 11 or 12 metres sits right on the threshold, so check your registered length and assume you will be using a buoy rather than your own ground tackle.
Anchoring is forbidden outright, all year round, in the strait between the island of Bagaud and Port-Cros, just in front of the harbour. This was one of the first zones closed to protect the seabed, and it is the spot people most often try to use because it looks sheltered and convenient. Do not.
The mooring buoys
The park lays a network of ecological mooring buoys, the kind anchored to a screw or block on bare ground rather than dropped onto the meadow. There are 68 of them. Sixty are reserved for boats from 0 to 15 metres, spread across four areas: North Bagaud has 11, South Bagaud 19, Anse Saint-Pierre 15, and the cove the French call Fausse Monnaie another 15. The remaining 5 buoys take larger units between 15 and 30 metres.
The buoy field, the ZMEL in French shorthand, is open to the public from roughly 15 April to 15 October, which matches the cruising season almost exactly. Outside those dates the equipment is lifted for the winter. Picking up a buoy is straightforward: approach slowly, the speed limit inside the park is low and enforced, hook the pendant, and make fast to your own line through the eye. Treat the pendant gently; it is park property and the moorings are checked and maintained.
There is a charge for the buoys in season, collected by the park, and demand outstrips supply in July and August. If the buoys are full you cannot simply anchor as a fallback inside the regulated zones, which is why a Port-Cros visit needs a plan B that means leaving the island, not improvising on the hook. The official CaPel reservation and information service run by the park is where to check availability and current rules before you sail.
The other rules you will meet
Inside the park, fishing is heavily restricted and spearfishing is banned. Jet skis and towed inflatables are not allowed. There is a no-discharge expectation; do not pump a holding tank anywhere near the island. Drones are prohibited. The underwater snorkelling trail off La Palud is the one activity the park actively encourages, and it is genuinely worth the swim, with marked stations explaining the meadow and the fish life.
The harbour itself, Port-Cros village, is small, has a handful of berths and fills fast. Most visiting boats use a park buoy and take the dinghy ashore rather than trying to get into the port. There is no fuel, no large shop and limited water, so arrive provisioned and topped up, exactly as you would for Porquerolles.
Picking up a buoy without drama
The mechanics deserve a word, because Port-Cros is not the place to learn boat-handling on a mooring with rangers and an audience watching. Approach the field slowly, into the wind, with a crew member at the bow holding a boathook and a doubled line ready. Hook the pendant, thread your own line through the eye and bring it back to the cleat; do not tie off short on the pendant itself, which chafes the park's gear. Once secured, check your swing against your neighbours, because the buoys are laid closer together than you might anchor and a 12-metre boat takes up real estate.
If the wind is fresh from the north-west, the North Bagaud buoys can be lively and the approach worth a practice pass first. In settled southerlies the Anse Saint-Pierre and Fausse Monnaie buoys on the more sheltered side are calmer. Whatever the conditions, arrive with the engine warm and the crew briefed, because a missed pickup in a crowded field is how charter holidays acquire a dented topside.
The cost and the booking reality
The buoys carry a nightly fee collected by the park, modest by the standards of a marina berth on this coast but not free, and you pay for the conservation work the moorings make possible. The honest planning point is supply: with only 68 buoys for the entire fleet wanting to visit one of the most famous islands in the Mediterranean, July and August demand far outstrips them. There is no overflow anchoring to fall back on inside the regulated zones, so the discipline is to arrive early in the day, by late morning if you can, and to have a genuine alternative if the field is full. That alternative means leaving the island, most often back to the sand anchorages off Porquerolles, rather than improvising a stop you are not allowed to make.
Fitting Port-Cros into a cruise
Port-Cros is too special to skip but too regulated to treat as a casual overnight stop, so plan it deliberately. The natural pairing is with its larger neighbour: spend a night anchored on the sand off Porquerolles and the Hyeres islands, then make the short hop to Port-Cros early enough to claim a buoy before the day-boats arrive. Keep an eye on the forecast, because the buoys at North Bagaud and the exposed coves offer little shelter when a Mistral builds, and our guide to reading the Mistral before it traps you explains why this wind catches people out here in particular.
For the wider context of how seagrass protection has reshaped where you can drop a hook all along this coast, our piece on Cote d'Azur anchoring rules puts Port-Cros in its place as the strictest example of a pattern that now runs from Marseille to Menton.
Come early, take a buoy, snorkel the trail, and treat the island as the privilege it is. The rules are demanding, but they are the reason Port-Cros still looks the way it did sixty years ago, and a morning on a quiet buoy in clear green water is reason enough to learn them properly.
