Villefranche, the great roadstead.

Villefranche-sur-Mer is not approached like a marina: the town offers no superyacht berth, and does not need one. Between Cap de Nice and Cap Ferrat opens one of the deepest roadsteads in the western Mediterranean — over 300 metres of water at the entrance, no continental shelf, a submarine canyon running the bay out to sea. Here, a 50-metre lives at anchor, in regulated zones, and reaches shore by tender.

That depth has made the bay a scientific site of world rank: at "Point B", in some 80 metres of water, the Institut de la Mer de Villefranche (Sorbonne University / CNRS), housed in the Darse buildings, has sampled the water every week since 1957 — one of the longest hydrological time series in the Mediterranean.

Above all, anchoring here means entering a regulatory corpus of its own:

• —Order no. 204/2020 — since 14 October 2020, anchoring and stopping for vessels of 20 metres and over has been regulated by the maritime prefect across the sector running from the mouth of the Var to the limit of French, Monegasque and Italian territorial waters, Villefranche bay included — while the threshold remains 24 metres in the west of the département (order no. 205/2020).
• —Order no. 252/2022 — navigation, anchoring and diving within the roadstead itself are governed by this dedicated order of 8 August 2022, specific to these waters.
• —Order no. 157/2024 as amended — for units of 45 metres and over, or 300 GT and over, this is the text — last amended by order no. 177/2026 of 3 June 2026 — that sets the Posidonia-related anchoring zones and prohibitions: the framework that binds a 50 m+ in the bay.
• —ZMEL — in service since 2022 (authorisation no. 264/2020), the commune's organised mooring area lines up eco-moorings across two sectors, Rochambeau (up to 12 m) and Palais de la Marine (up to 16 m). Reserved for craft of 6 to 16 metres: a superyacht has no access — it anchors in the authorised zones, its tenders received at Port de la Santé or the Darse.

The bay is also the département's leading cruise anchorage — around 90 calls and over 220,000 passengers in 2019, according to the departmental ports. Since the interprefectoral order of 9 December 2025, that traffic is capped: an annual average of 2,000 passengers landed per call day, a hard ceiling of 3,000 at once, a single ship of more than 1,300 passengers per day and per anchorage zone — with calls already scheduled for 2026-2027 exempt. Knowing which morning a cruise ship holds the bay and its landing quay is no small detail when you operate by tender: it is the kind of watch we keep across our Côte d'Azur area.