Palma de Mallorca: A 2026 Yachting Guide to the Med's Refit Capital

Palma de Mallorca yachting is not a season, it is a year-round industry. While Monaco gets the magazine covers and Antibes gets the brokerage lunches, Palma quietly does the work that keeps the Mediterranean fleet on the water. The city sits at the head of a wide bay on the south coast of Mallorca, the largest of Spain's Balearic Islands, and over the last three decades it has become the place large yachts come to be hauled out, opened up, repainted, rewired, and sent back to sea. If you want to understand where the money and the skill in European yachting actually live, you spend a winter in Palma.

This guide is written for two kinds of people. The first is crew: deckhands, engineers, stews, chefs, and captains who want to find work in a port where boats are always looking for hands. The second is owners, managers, and the marine businesses that serve them, who need to find vetted refit yards, specialist trades, and reliable crew without wasting a season on guesswork. Palma rewards both, but only if you know how the port is put together. So let us walk through it: the shipyards, the marinas, the crew scene, the charter fleet, the trades, and the calendar that governs all of it.

Why Palma de Mallorca yachting became the Med's refit capital

The short answer is space, skill, and weather. Palma has a deep commercial harbour with room to haul very large vessels, a climate mild enough to paint through most of the winter, and a labour pool that has been building superyachts' worth of experience since the 1980s. The longer answer is that one facility, STP Shipyard Palma, changed the economics of refit in Europe and pulled an entire cluster of businesses in around it.

Astilleros de Mallorca, the older yard on the western side of the commercial port, was one of the first anywhere to offer a full one-stop refit and repair service for large yachts. It built a reputation for steel and aluminium work and for the kind of engineering that owners trust with a twenty year old hull. When STP opened as a dedicated repair and refit marina, the two facilities together gave Palma something no rival port could match: enough hardstanding, enough lift capacity, and enough contractors under one set of gates that a captain could book a haul-out and find every trade needed within a short walk.

That density is the real product. A refit is not one job, it is fifty jobs happening at once, and the port that lets those jobs run in parallel without trucking parts across a country wins. Palma won. Today the winter population of the port swells with vessels on the hard, scaffolding wrapped in white shrink tarp, and a small army of painters, fabricators, electricians, and interior specialists working to a spring deadline.

STP Shipyard Palma and the refit cluster

STP stands for Servicios Tecnicos Portuarios, and if you spend any time in Mediterranean yachting you will hear the three letters constantly. The yard sits inside Palma's commercial port and operates as a refit marina rather than a builder: it does not construct yachts, it hauls them, holds them, and rents the space and services around them while independent contractors do the work. That model, an open yard where the owner or manager picks their own trades, is a large part of why Palma stayed competitive as costs rose elsewhere.

The numbers are genuinely large. STP can host more than 140 yachts at once, including vessels up to 120 metres in length. Its travel lifts run through a range of capacities, roughly 100, 150, 200, and 700 tons, and in 2024 it commissioned a 1,000 ton travel lift, the only one of its size in Europe and among the largest in the world. That machine measures around 26 metres long and 25 metres high, rides on 32 electrically powered wheels, and lets the yard lift boats that previously had to go into a dry dock or a floating platform. For an owner deciding where to refit a 70 metre motor yacht, the difference between a yard that can lift you and one that has to improvise is the whole decision.

STP has kept investing. The yard announced a multi-million euro expansion that adds new berths able to take yachts up to around 110 metres alongside, a response to demand that keeps outrunning the space. Around STP and Astilleros de Mallorca sits the cluster that makes the port work. Pinmar, the paint company that effectively wrote the playbook for superyacht coatings, runs full turnkey refit services out of STP. Firms handling teak, rigging, hydraulics, refrigeration, audio-visual, upholstery, and stainless fabrication all keep units in or near the port. The IPM Marine Group umbrella ties a number of these together, but plenty of the best trades are small independent shops run by people who have been coating and welding Palma hulls for twenty years.

For owners and managers, the honest challenge is not finding a yard, it is finding the right contractors inside and around the yard, and checking that a firm's references are real before you hand over a paint job that can run into seven figures. If you are weighing a full project, it is worth reading a plain-English breakdown of what drives the bill first; our yacht refit guide and costs walks through haul-out fees, paint, class surveys, and the line items that surprise first-time owners.

Facility	Role	Max size handled	Notable capability
STP Shipyard Palma	Refit marina, open contractor model	Up to 120 m, 1,000 tons	Europe's only 1,000 t travel lift; 140+ yachts at once
Astilleros de Mallorca	Full-service refit and repair yard	Up to roughly 90 m	Steel and aluminium, one-stop project management
Pinmar (at STP)	Paint and coatings, turnkey refit	Any size in the port	Superyacht paint systems and fairing
Independent trade shops	Teak, rigging, AV, upholstery, stainless	Any	Deep specialist labour pool, competitive rates

The marinas: where the fleet actually berths

Refit is the winter story. In summer the same fleet needs somewhere to sit, and Palma bay offers a spread of marinas from serious superyacht berths to the working docks near the yards. Knowing the difference matters whether you are berthing a boat or looking for the passerelle you will step aboard for a job interview.

Club de Mar Mallorca is the flagship. It sits right at the entrance to the commercial port, a short walk from the old town, and after a long redevelopment it offers around 575 berths with the ability to take yachts up to 135 metres, plus a waiting dock that can hold vessels as long as 350 metres alongside. Its clubhouse, restaurants, and crew facilities make it the social centre of the large-yacht scene in the city. If a captain is hiring for a big program, there is a good chance the boat is on that dock or one like it.

Puerto Portals sits about ten kilometres west of the city centre, past the suburb of Portals Nous. It holds around 650 berths for yachts up to roughly 60 metres and is the glamorous end of the bay, lined with boutiques, waterfront restaurants, and the kind of terrace where charter deals get done over lunch. It is less of a heavy-industry port and more of a shop window, which makes it a good place for crew to network in season even when the boats there are not the ones being refitted.

Closer to the working port you find Marina Port de Mallorca, Pantalán del Mediterráneo, and the STP marina berths themselves, which take superyachts in the 20 to 120 metre range with the dockside power, water, and services that a large crew needs day to day. These are the practical berths, less about the promenade and more about being plugged in near the trades. Add the municipal and club moorings around the bay, from the Real Club Náutico de Palma to smaller harbours east and west, and the region can hold an enormous number of boats across the season.

Marina	Approx. berths	Max LOA	Character
Club de Mar Mallorca	~575	Up to 135 m (waiting dock to 350 m)	Flagship superyacht marina, city centre
Puerto Portals	~650	Up to ~60 m	Glamour marina, restaurants, 10 km west
Marina Port de Mallorca / Pantalán del Mediterráneo	Several hundred combined	20 to 120 m	Working superyacht berths near the yards
Real Club Náutico de Palma	~1,000	Mixed, up to ~40 m	Historic sailing club, races and regattas

The crew scene: finding work in Palma

Palma is one of the two or three best places on earth to be a job-hunting yacht crew member, and the reason is the refit calendar. In most Mediterranean ports the hiring peak is a narrow window in spring before the charter season. In Palma the boats are physically present all winter, engineers and mates are often kept on through the yard period, and day work is available almost continuously because a hull in refit needs painters' labourers, cleaners, and extra hands. A green deckhand who cannot get a look-in at a Riviera marina in July can build a reputation in Palma over a January of daywork and walk into a permanent job by March.

The traditional route runs through crew agencies. The Crew Network, part of Fraser, keeps a large office in Palma and places qualified, vetted crew both onto boats in refit and onto programs for the season. Long-established local agents such as those inside the yacht-agent firms handle both crew and the wider logistics of a boat's stay. Registering with two or three reputable agencies, in person, remains part of the playbook, and agencies do genuinely open doors on larger and more private programs.

The catch, and every crew member knows it, is that agencies serve the boat, not you. They place who they already trust, they can be slow to answer a first-year stew, and a permanent placement can carry a fee structure that owners increasingly question. That is exactly the gap where a direct platform helps. On Yacht Service Network a captain in Palma searching for a chef or a bosun finds your profile, your tickets, your references, and your availability, and messages you directly with no agency between you. It does not replace walking the docks with a stack of CVs, it means the captain who liked your CV can find you again a week later.

If you are new to the industry, do not underestimate the value of simply being in Palma with the right paperwork. You need your STCW basic safety training and, for most roles, a valid ENG1 medical. Beyond that, the port hires on attitude and reliability first. We put together a practical, step-by-step piece on breaking in, how to write a CV that captains actually read, where to daywork, and how to turn a temporary gig into a permanent berth, in our guide to yacht crew jobs and how to get hired. Read it before your first season and you will waste far less of it.

Daywork and the winter refit economy

Daywork deserves its own note because it is the engine of the Palma crew market. During refit, boats and contractors need short-term labour: sanding, taping, general cleaning, tender moves, provisioning runs, and covering for crew on leave. Day rates for general work commonly sit in the 100 to 150 euro range, with skilled trades and experienced crew commanding more. It is cash-flow while you look for a permanent seat, it is a foot in the door on a specific boat, and it is how the port's reputation network gets built. Show up on time, work hard, and the mate who supervised you will remember your name when a full-time slot opens.

The charter fleet and putting a yacht to work

Palma is a charter base as well as a refit base. The Balearics are one of the most sought-after cruising grounds in the Mediterranean, with Ibiza and Formentera a short hop south, the calas of Mallorca's own coast, and Menorca to the east. Charter yachts stage out of Palma, provision here, and change guests here, which means charter crew, charter brokers, and charter management all have a strong presence in the city.

It is worth being clear about what a platform like Yacht Service Network does and does not do here, because honesty matters. YSN is not a charter-booking website. You do not book a week on a yacht through it. What it does is connect the people who make charter operations run: crew who want charter-season work, marine businesses that service charter yachts, and owners who are weighing whether to put their boat into charter to offset the cost of ownership. Charter income can turn a yacht from a pure expense into something that partly pays for itself, but it comes with wear, crew turnover, and a management burden that most owners underestimate.

That management burden is where owners in Palma most often need help, and where the local ecosystem is deep. A good management company handles the accounting, the flag and class compliance, the crew payroll, the maintenance schedule, and the charter marketing, so the owner is not personally fielding calls from a broker in August. If you are considering it, our yacht charter management guide lays out how the commercial side works, what management companies charge, and how to judge whether charter makes sense for your particular boat. When you are ready to find a firm, you can compare vetted charter management providers directly on the platform.

For crew, the charter fleet is a different rhythm from a private program. Charter means more guest weeks, higher tips, and harder work in July and August, then often a quieter shoulder season. Many crew build a career by alternating: a private boat for stability one year, a busy charter yacht for the tip income the next. Because the Balearic and Caribbean seasons sit opposite each other on the calendar, a lot of Palma crew follow the sun west for winter. If that is your plan, keep an eye on crew jobs in Antigua, which fills up as the Caribbean season approaches and draws heavily on the same crew pool that summers in Mallorca.

Provisioning and specialist trades

A superyacht is a small floating hotel, and Palma is one of the best places in the western Mediterranean to stock one. The city has a genuinely serious provisioning trade, with companies that can turn around a full pre-season food and beverage order or a same-day refill between charters, sourcing everything from local Mallorcan produce and Iberian hams to the specific brand of sparkling water a guest asked for by name. Chefs based in Palma have access to Spanish regional products, established supplier relationships, and a logistics network built specifically for the demands of large-yacht galleys.

Beyond food, the trades directory of Palma reads like a full industrial estate dedicated to yachts. Sailmakers and riggers, electronics and audio-visual integrators, refrigeration and air-conditioning engineers, hydraulic and stabiliser specialists, teak deck layers, upholsterers and interior fit-out shops, stainless and aluminium fabricators, tender and toy specialists, diesel and generator technicians, and the surveyors and class agents who sign off the work. The Poligono industrial estates near the port, especially around Son Castello and the commercial harbour, house a large share of them.

The strength of this cluster is also its difficulty for a newcomer. There are hundreds of firms, quality varies, and a captain arriving for the first time has no easy way to tell the excellent electrician from the one who will disappear mid-job. This is precisely the problem YSN was built to solve: a searchable directory of marine businesses with reviews, so an owner or captain can find the right trade, read what other boats said, and make contact without relying on a single agent's short list. For the businesses themselves, listing is free and it puts them in front of exactly the buyers who are looking.

The Palma season: a working calendar

Palma's year has a clear shape, and understanding it is the single most useful thing for both crew and owners planning around the port. The two halves of the calendar, refit winter and charter summer, feed each other, and the shoulder months between them are when the smart planning happens.

Period	What happens in Palma	Crew opportunity	Owner and manager focus
November to February	Peak refit season, yards full, boats on the hard	Daywork, engineering and interior gigs, kept-on crew	Book yard slot, tender projects, class surveys
March to April	Refits finishing, boats splashing, hiring ramps up	Best window for permanent placements before season	Sea trials, provisioning, crew rounded out
May to September	Charter and cruising season across the Balearics	Season roles, charter tips, busy guest weeks	Charter marketing, guest turnarounds, maintenance
October	Season winds down, boats return, projects scoped	End-of-season pay-offs, start of winter daywork	Plan the winter refit, get quotes, book contractors

Two events anchor the professional calendar. The Palma International Boat Show, held in the spring, turns the whole port into a marketplace and is a strong week for networking whether you sell services or look for a berth. Later, the industry's own trade gathering brings owners, managers, and the refit and services businesses together to do the deals that shape the following winter. If you work in the industry, being present in Palma for those weeks is worth more than months of cold emails.

For crew planning a year, the pattern is simple to state and harder to live: arrive in Palma in the autumn or very early spring, not mid-summer. By June the season boats are crewed and the market is quiet. By walking the docks in March, registering with agencies, keeping a live profile that captains can find, and picking up daywork in the yards, you put yourself where the hiring actually is. Arrive in July with no contacts and you will spend the best month of the year looking rather than earning.

Living and working in Palma

Beyond the docks, Palma is a real city and a genuinely good place to spend a winter, which is part of why crew keep coming back. The old town wraps around the cathedral, La Seu, with narrow streets full of cafes, and the city has cheap flights to the rest of Europe, decent healthcare, and a large enough international community that a first-season crew member can find their feet quickly. Rents rose sharply through the 2020s, so many crew share flats in the districts around Santa Catalina, a neighbourhood that has become the unofficial crew quarter, full of bars and breakfast spots where the industry gathers.

Santa Catalina is worth knowing about as more than a place to live. Its cafes and its market are where a lot of informal hiring happens, where a chef hears about a chef's job and a deckhand hears that a boat two docks over lost a mate. The industry in Palma runs on this kind of face-to-face word of mouth as much as on formal channels, which is why physically being there matters and why keeping your online profile current matters just as much: the conversation in the cafe leads to someone looking you up that evening.

For the practical side of managing a career or a boat on the move, the Yacht Service Network app puts your profile, messages, and saved services in your pocket, which is useful when you are hopping between docks or between Palma and the Caribbean. You can download the app and keep everything in one place rather than losing contacts in a phone full of screenshots.

Palma compared to its rivals

It helps to place Palma against the other big Mediterranean yachting centres, because each does something slightly different and crew and owners often move between them. Antibes and the wider French Riviera remain the historic heart of brokerage and the densest crew market in high summer, but France carries higher costs and heavier social charges, and its refit capacity does not match Palma's. Barcelona has grown fast as a build and refit centre with the MB92 group, and it competes directly with Palma for the largest projects, though Palma's open-yard contractor model keeps it attractive for owners who want to control their own trades. Genoa and the Italian yards dominate new build. Malta and Gibraltar compete on flag and tax rather than on hands-on work.

Where Palma wins, consistently, is on the combination of lift capacity, contractor density, weather, and lifestyle for the people doing the work. An owner who wants a controlled, one-stop project might prefer a fully integrated yard elsewhere. An owner who wants the widest choice of trades, the ability to shop each part of the job, and a crew that is happy to spend the winter there tends to end up in Palma. For crew, the calculation is simpler still: no other port keeps this many large boats physically present and working through the winter, which means no other port offers this much chance to get hired outside the narrow spring window.

Port	Strength	Trade-off
Palma de Mallorca	Refit capacity, open contractor model, year-round crew market	Rising rents, summer market crowded
Antibes / Riviera	Brokerage heart, biggest summer crew pool	High costs, limited large-refit capacity
Barcelona	Large new-build and refit yards	Less of an all-in-one crew town
Genoa / Italy	New build and Italian craftsmanship	More builder-led than open refit

A practical plan for owners and managers

If you are bringing a yacht to Palma for a refit, a few things separate a smooth winter from a painful one. Book your yard slot early, because the good windows at STP and Astilleros de Mallorca fill months ahead, especially for the larger lifts. Define the scope in writing before you arrive, get fixed quotes for the big items like paint and steel, and build a contingency of at least fifteen to twenty percent, because a refit almost always finds problems once the boat is opened up. Choose your project manager carefully, whether that is your own captain, a management company, or an independent surveyor, because in an open yard the owner's side has to coordinate the trades rather than relying on a single yard to run everything.

Vet your contractors the way you would vet a crew member. Ask for references on comparable boats, visit current projects if you can, and check reviews rather than taking a broker's word. The best trades in Palma are excellent and fairly priced by European standards, but the range is wide, and the cost of a bad paint job or a rushed system install is measured in the whole next season. A platform with real reviews and direct contact takes a lot of the risk out of that first choice, which is the entire reason the directory exists.

A practical plan for crew

If you are chasing your first or your fifth season, treat Palma as a base to be built rather than a lottery to be entered. Get your paperwork sorted before you arrive: STCW, ENG1, and any role-specific tickets. Arrive in the shoulder season, register in person with the main agencies, and put a complete, honest profile online so the captains who meet you can find you again. Daywork every hour you can in the yards, because reputation compounds and the mate who liked your work today hires you in March. Keep your references current and reachable. And follow the season west when the Med goes quiet, because the crew who work all year are the ones who treated Palma and the Caribbean as two ends of a single calendar rather than two separate gambles.

Frequently asked questions about Palma de Mallorca yachting

Why is Palma called the Med's refit capital?

Palma combines the largest concentration of large-yacht lift and hardstanding capacity in the Mediterranean with a deep pool of specialist contractors and a mild winter climate suitable for painting. STP Shipyard Palma alone can host more than 140 yachts at once and operates Europe's only 1,000 ton travel lift. That density of yards, trades, and lift capacity in one port is why owners bring boats there to refit.

What is STP Shipyard Palma?

STP stands for Servicios Tecnicos Portuarios, a refit and repair marina inside Palma's commercial port. It does not build yachts; it hauls and berths them and rents space while independent contractors, chosen by the owner or manager, carry out the work. This open-yard model lets owners shop each part of a project, which is a big reason Palma stays competitive with fully integrated yards elsewhere.

How do I find yacht crew work in Palma?

Register in person with reputable crew agencies such as The Crew Network, keep a complete online profile that captains can find, and pick up daywork in the shipyards to build a reputation. The best time to arrive is autumn or early spring, before the season boats are crewed. Because Palma keeps large yachts present and working all winter, it offers more hiring chances outside the narrow spring window than almost any other port.

When is the best time to look for work in Palma?

March and April are the strongest window for permanent placements, as refits finish and boats crew up before the charter season. Winter, from November to February, is excellent for daywork and engineering or interior gigs on boats in refit. Arriving in mid-summer is the hardest time, because the season programs are already fully crewed by June.

What does a refit in Palma cost?

Costs vary enormously with the size of the boat and the scope, from a routine haul-out, antifoul, and survey running into the tens of thousands of euros, to a full repaint and systems refit on a large motor yacht reaching well into seven figures. Paint is usually the single biggest line item. Build a contingency of fifteen to twenty percent because opening a boat up reveals work that was not in the original quote. Our refit guide breaks the line items down in detail.

Which marinas in Palma take superyachts?

Club de Mar Mallorca is the flagship, with berths for yachts up to 135 metres and a waiting dock for far larger vessels. Marina Port de Mallorca and Pantalán del Mediterráneo take superyachts in the 20 to 120 metre range near the working port, and Puerto Portals, ten kilometres west, holds yachts up to around 60 metres in a more social setting. Between them the bay can berth a very large fleet across the season.

Can I put my yacht into charter from Palma?

Yes. Palma is a strong charter base for the Balearics, and many owners offset ownership costs by chartering their yacht for part of the season. It requires commercial registration, the right crew, and usually a management company to handle marketing, compliance, and accounting. Charter brings income but also wear and a real management burden, so weigh it carefully; a charter management guide and vetted management firms can help you decide.

Is Yacht Service Network a charter-booking site?

No. Yacht Service Network is a free platform that connects the yachting world: crew who want work, marine businesses that want to be found, and owners and managers who need vetted services and crew. You do not book charter holidays through it. Instead, crew build profiles and get hired directly, businesses list for free and get found, and owners find refit yards, trades, and management companies with real reviews and direct contact.