On 13 November 2025 the Municipal Port Fund of Mykonos published a list of works already under way, and there is nothing on it a broker would put in a brochure. The quay wall at Tourlos Marina was being repaired and restored, with protective concrete slabs sunk against it. The ramp on which boats are launched and hauled was being repaired. Behind the artificial blocks, the excavation was being filled with graded material. The formwork of the Islet’s superstructure had been completed and the concreting was to follow; the last stage of the work was the concreting of that superstructure and the fitting of bollards and fenders. It is a list of structural repairs to the harbour where most of the island’s yachts lie, and it matters more than anything decorative would have.
The list, read plainly
Athanasios Kousathanas-Megas, president of the Port Fund, gave the purpose in one sentence: the works aim at still better service for berthed vessels, within the effort to develop yachting further — which, together with cruise, contributes to the qualitative upgrade of the island and to the strengthening of the local economy.
Read what he said, and then read what he did not. There is no promise of more berths in that sentence, and no promise of longer ones. A quay wall being restored is a quay wall that had begun to fail. Concrete slabs sunk against its foot are scour protection, laid because the sea was taking the ground from beneath it. Graded material filled in behind artificial blocks is a wall being given back the mass that holds it in place. This is the work a harbour does when the structure it already has needs to survive another decade of summers, not the work it does when it intends to take a larger class of vessel.
Bollards and fenders
The last item on the list is the one a captain feels. Bollards and fenders are the only parts of a marina a hull and a line actually touch. A bollard that has worked loose in its bedding is a line that cannot be trusted in a meltemi; a fender row that has gone hard or gone missing is topside paint, and then topside plating. They are the least photogenic items in a port budget and the first thing a crew inspects on arrival.
That they come last in the sequence is the sequence working correctly. Furniture is bolted to a superstructure, a superstructure is poured onto a wall, and a wall is only worth pouring onto once its face and its backfill are sound. Tourlos was rebuilt from the ground the sea washes upward, which is slower than dressing the quay and lasts considerably longer.
The 25-metre line
The Port Fund’s own regulation is unambiguous about what lies where. Tourlos — the New Port — takes vessels of less than 25 metres overall: motor yachts, sailing yachts and rigid inflatables. Motor yachts above 25 metres go to the Old Port at Chora, where sailing yachts of any kind are barred outright.
So the modernisation of Tourlos is not the arrival of superyacht berthing on Mykonos, whatever the season’s traffic might suggest it ought to be. It is the repair of the harbour that holds the smaller half of the fleet. A yacht of 40 metres reads this news and lies exactly where it lay before — at the Old Port, or on its own anchor off Ornos or Panormos, tender running. What changes for that owner is indirect and real: the marina that absorbs everything under 25 metres keeps absorbing it, and does not begin shedding berths into an island that has nowhere to put them.
A working port first
Tourlos was built to move people, and it still does. The Port Fund prohibits the entry and exit of private and commercial pleasure yachts between 09:30 and 10:30 outright, because that is when the scheduled passenger and car ferries run. Yachts may arrive for mooring only between noon and sunset. The captain is forbidden to leave the island for the whole duration of the mooring.
These are the rules of a ferry and cruise port that also keeps yachts, and they are worth knowing before a passage plan is drawn to arrive at ten in the morning. A harbour with that much scheduled traffic through it wears at a rate a private marina does not, which is a plainer explanation for a failing quay wall than any other.
What it changes
Nothing a client saw in the season, which is the point. The works ran through the winter months, when the Cyclades give a port the only quiet weeks it gets, and the repair of the damaged quay wall in the marina stood on the Port Fund’s list of works completed in 2025. The berth a yacht takes in July was decided by concrete cured in December, by whether a wall was given its mass back, by whether the bollard on the quay is bedded in something sound.
Mykonos is judged on its tables and its light. It is held up by its quay walls, and in November 2025 it began giving them the attention they had been owed. By August 2026 the quay walls of the New Port were back in full operational condition, the restoration complete.
The house makes the introduction, for those who ask.
