La Maddalena's New Limits: What Applies to a Crewed Charter

La Maddalena has new limits on boats for the 2026 and 2027 seasons, and most of the headlines got them wrong for charter clients. The 12-person cap and the 700-boats-a-day cap apply to boats rented out inside the park. A crewed charter yacht visiting the archipelago is not covered by them. What does apply to everyone are the Coast Guard’s rules on speed, swimming, anchoring and seagrass, in force since 2 June 2026 and running as a two-year trial. Planning a crewed yacht charter in Italy? Start with our Italy yacht charter guide.

What this means for your charter

You can still spend days in the archipelago on a crewed yacht. Your captain plans around four rules:

7 knots within 500 m of any shore, 10 knots between 500 and 1,000 m
no anchoring on posidonia seagrass; sand only, or a park buoy
swimming only within 5 m of your own yacht in the regulated zones
fixed emergency corridors along the island shores where nothing may anchor

The famous closed spots stay closed: Budelli’s pink beach cannot be landed on, and the fully protected zones cannot be entered. Everything else, Cala Coticcio, Porto della Madonna, Cala Corsara, Spargi, is open with a buoy or a sand anchorage.

Where do the 12 people and 700 boats come from?

Two separate documents. The park board approved them on 13 April 2026 as Deliberazione n. 10, and they regulate the local rental trade, not visiting yachts:

Locazione (boats rented without crew, the day-boats out of Palau and La Maddalena): a ceiling of 700 permits a day inside the park, 500 for boats under 10 m and 200 for larger ones, and a maximum of 12 people on board regardless of what the boat is rated for. Beach landings by tender are banned and landings are limited to docks between 17:00 and 09:00.
Noleggio (local crewed boats): 450 permits, down from 500, three quarters of them reserved for La Maddalena residents, with fines of EUR 1,032 to 3,098 for operating without one.

A charter yacht arriving from Porto Cervo, Olbia or Corsica does not hold or need one of these permits. The rules that reach her are in the Coast Guard’s Ordinanza 33/2026, published on 2 April 2026 and in force from 2 June, which sets the speed, swimming, anchoring and corridor rules above for the summer months of 2026 and 2027.

Our take

The park is trying to cut the number of small boats in the coves on an August afternoon, and that is good news for a crewed yacht. The place was losing its calm. For a Sardinia week we still send clients through the archipelago, with one change: the captain fixes the day’s anchorage in the morning, on sand or a buoy, instead of drifting from cove to cove. If your group is larger than 12, nothing changes for you; the cap is not yours.