June and September, on either side of the August crowds, when the yachts fill Porto Cervo and the sea is at its warmest. No partner house sits on the Costa Smeralda, so we place you in its landmark hotels and private villas above Porto Cervo and Romazzino, with a tender and helicopter on call.
The Costa Smeralda keeps a short, brilliant season, and knowing its rhythm is most of the game. June is the opening: warm water, long light, the beaches still uncrowded and the marina filling with the first of the summer's yachts.
July and August are the spectacle, with Porto Cervo at full volume, the Yacht Club Costa Smeralda in the thick of its regatta calendar, the Old Port lined with the largest boats afloat, and prices and crowds to match. September is the connoisseur's month: the sea at its warmest after a long summer, the fleet thinning, the evenings softening, and the whole coast exhaling. By late October most of it has closed for the winter.
The coast itself is the point. The Aga Khan's consortium built the Costa Smeralda in the 1960s to a single vision, and it still shows: low stone-and-stucco architecture folded into the granite, no high-rises, the maquis left to grow between the villas.
The water is the improbable green that gave the coast its name, clearest around the Maddalena archipelago, a cluster of granite islands and empty coves a short tender north and the finest day's cruising in the western Mediterranean. Beaches such as Spiaggia del Principe, Liscia Ruja and Romazzino lie within a few minutes of one another; beyond the resort strip the rest of Sardinia is wilder and emptier, the Gallura hills rising behind and Corsica an hour's run across the Strait of Bonifacio.
Olbia's Costa Smeralda airport takes private traffic and sits about twenty minutes from Porto Cervo, which makes the coast unusually easy to reach on your own schedule; a helicopter shortens the transfers further and opens the archipelago and the southern beaches. None of our partner houses operates on the coast itself, so we arrange its landmark hotels above Porto Cervo, Romazzino and Pitrizza, or a fully staffed private villa with its own pool and mooring, and keep a boat, and where it helps a helicopter, on call for the islands, for lunch at Cala di Volpe, and for the harbours up and down the coast.
GALLERY
