Porto Cervo is younger than my mother and it is designed to look older than my grandmother, and once you have noticed that you cannot stop noticing it.
There was nothing here before 1962. Not a fishing village that grew, not a port that silted up and came back. A committee of architects drew a village, and then it was built, and the result is a set of low pale buildings with rounded arches, hand-shaped openings, irregular steps and terracotta roofs, arranged around small squares in the way a Mediterranean village arranges itself when it has grown over four hundred years.
I expected to find that insufferable. In practice the design is good enough that I stopped caring within an hour, and the reason is simple: it works. The arcades are cool in the afternoon. The scale is small. Nothing is straight, nothing is tall, and you can walk the whole thing in twenty minutes.
Which is also the honest warning. Porto Cervo is an evening, or two. It is not a base for a week and it is not somewhere you will run out of things to do slowly.
The little square everyone means
The centre of the village is a small stepped square with arcades running off it, cafés under the arches and shops behind them. Everyone calls it the piazzetta and everybody means the same place.
In daylight it is quiet and rather lovely and slightly stage-set. Between about seven and nine in the evening it becomes the reason people come: the tables fill, the light goes gold and then blue, and the entire population of the coast appears to be walking slowly past the same forty metres of shopfront in both directions.
The shops are the shops. Every luxury house you would expect has a unit here, alongside a smaller number of Sardinian makers selling filigree jewellery and woven cloth, which is the more interesting shopping by some distance. Prices are Milan prices with a summer surcharge.
Sit down for one drink and understand what you are paying for, which is the seat and the parade rather than the drink.
The white church on the rise
Up above the marina there is a small whitewashed church with soft curved walls, a free-standing bell arch and no straight lines at all, which is the single best piece of architecture in the village.
It is by Michele Busiri Vici, one of the architects on the original committee, and it does what the whole coast’s rulebook was trying to do: it sits into the granite rather than on top of it, and the shape reads as much older than it is. Inside, there is a Mater Dolorosa which the village will tell you is by El Greco. The attribution is disputed and you should take it as a nice story rather than a fact, but the painting is worth two minutes regardless.
Go up in the early evening. The view back down over the marina from the terrace outside is free, unobstructed, and better than the view from most of the restaurants charging for it.
The marina walk
This is the best free thing on the Costa Smeralda and it takes about half an hour.
The marina berths some of the largest private yachts in the Mediterranean, stern-to along the quay, passerelles down. You can walk the entire length of it. Nobody stops you, nobody asks anything, and the crews are visibly used to being looked at and largely indifferent to it. In the early evening the deck lights come on, tenders come in and out, and the whole thing is a moving spectacle of somebody else’s money that costs you nothing to watch.
Two weeks in September turn it into something else again. The yacht club here runs a pair of Rolex regattas back to back, and for that fortnight the berths hold racing hulls rather than motor yachts, with crews working on deck all day and the whole quay smelling of sun cream and epoxy. The exact dates are in the best time to visit. If you have any interest in boats at all, that fortnight is the best time to be in this village. If you have none, it is still the prettiest the harbour looks all year, and the boats leave the dock in the morning where you can watch them go.
The markets
There is a small market in Porto Cervo on Friday mornings, roughly nine until noon, selling the usual mix of cloth, ceramics, leather and food.
It is fine. The one worth planning your week around is inland at San Pantaleo on Thursday, which is a proper artists’ and makers’ market in a village that has had a working creative community in it since the seventies. Porto Rotondo takes Saturday. All three are in the day trips guide.
Eating and drinking here
The quayside restaurants are expensive, and a couple of them are genuinely very good rather than simply costly, including a Michelin-starred kitchen in the village. There are also long-standing seafood tables people have been returning to for thirty years.
What there is not, in Porto Cervo, is cheap and honest. That is ten minutes inland at a farmhouse under a pergola, and the comparison between the two dinners is in where to eat on the Costa Smeralda.
For the evening after dinner, the sunset bars on the rocks a short drive away are the good version of this coast’s nightlife, and the nightlife guide explains how the money works once it gets dark.
Parking, and the practical bits
There is paid parking below the village and it fills in the evening in August. Go before seven or be prepared to walk in from further out.
Nothing in the village needs booking except restaurants, which need booking badly in high season. Dress is smart-casual and nobody will turn you away for shorts in the daytime, though you will feel it slightly at dinner.
And do not plan a beach day around Porto Cervo itself. The village has a marina, not a beach. The bays are a short drive out in either direction and they are covered in the best beaches on the Costa Smeralda.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Porto Cervo worth visiting?
Yes, for an evening. It is a well-designed purpose-built village with good architecture, excellent people-watching and a marina you can walk the length of for nothing. It is not worth a week, and it is not a beach base, because it does not have a beach of its own.
How long do you need in Porto Cervo?
Two or three hours covers the village comfortably. An evening is the right unit: arrive around six, walk the marina, go up to the church for the view, then sit in the square while it fills. Most people do it twice in a week and that is about right.
Do you have to be rich to enjoy Porto Cervo?
No. The marina walk, the church, the view from the terrace above the harbour and the whole evening parade cost nothing at all. What costs money is sitting down, shopping and eating on the quay. It is entirely possible to have the good half of Porto Cervo for the price of one drink.
When was Porto Cervo built?
From 1962 onward, as the harbour and centre of the newly created Costa Smeralda. It was designed rather than grown, by the same architectural committee that wrote the coast’s building rules, which is why it looks like a much older Mediterranean village and why nothing in it is straight or tall.
What is there to do in Porto Cervo besides shopping?
Walk the marina and look at the yachts, go up to the whitewashed church on the rise for the harbour view, sit in the stepped square in the early evening, and in September watch the Rolex regattas leave the harbour. The Friday morning market is small but worth twenty minutes if you are passing.
Read also: The Best Beaches on the Costa Smeralda | Costa Smeralda Nightlife, and What It Really Costs | The Complete Guide to the Costa Smeralda
