Capri has a reputation for being ruined by its own popularity. People who have visited once, in August, by ferry, tend to hold this view firmly.
The island is not ruined. It is busy at particular hours, in particular places, and those hours and places are entirely predictable — because they are set by a timetable. Hydrofoils from Naples and Sorrento deliver several thousand people into Marina Grande between mid-morning and midday, and take them away again in the late afternoon.
Arrive on your own keel and you are simply not on that timetable. That single fact changes the island more than any other decision you will make about it.
Marina Piccola, and why it works
The south-facing bay beneath the Faraglioni is the natural daytime anchorage. It is sheltered from the prevailing northerlies, the water is deep and clear, and the tender ride ashore is short.
It is also the best seat in the house for the rock stacks, particularly in the late afternoon when the light comes round behind them and the whole formation turns amber for about twenty minutes.
It is not, however, a place to lie overnight in a southerly. If the wind backs, your captain will move round to the north side of the island, and the first you are likely to know about it is a different view at breakfast. That is what a professional crew is for.
The Faraglioni
Three limestone stacks, the middle one pierced by a natural arch wide enough to take a tender. Passing through it is the photograph everybody wants, which is exactly why it is worth doing at nine rather than at noon, when a queue forms on both sides.
The swimming here is remarkable and the water is deep straight off the rock. The blue lizard that lives on the outermost stack exists nowhere else on earth — the sort of detail a good captain produces at precisely the right moment.
The Blue Grotto, and the honest version
The Grotta Azzurra deserves its reputation. You enter lying flat in a small rowing boat, through an opening barely a metre high, and inside the light arrives underwater and turns the entire cave a saturated, lit blue. It is genuinely strange and genuinely beautiful.
Two things are worth saying plainly, because they are usually left out.
It is best early. From mid-morning the wait can exceed an hour, in open sun, in a raft of waiting boats — and the visit itself lasts a few minutes. It also closes in any north-westerly swell, sometimes at short notice and without appeal. Plan it into the morning of a settled day, and have something else in mind for that morning if the sea disagrees.
Where the island goes quiet
Most visitors see perhaps a fifth of Capri's coastline. The rest is available to anyone with a tender and an hour.
- Grotta Verde, off Punta Vitareta — smaller and greener than its famous cousin, far less visited, and you can swim into it rather than queue for it.
- Bagni di Tiberio, on the north-west shore — a shallow, sandy anchorage directly above submerged Roman ruins, with a beach club ashore.
- Punta Carena, at the south-western tip — the lighthouse, the last of the sun, and the best sunset swim on the island.
- Cala di Mitigliano, on the mainland opposite — not Capri at all, ten minutes away, and usually empty when Capri is not.
Going ashore, and when
Marina Grande is the working harbour and the arrival point for everything with an engine and a schedule. Berths for visiting yachts are limited and spoken for well in advance in July and August. We arrange them where they exist; where they do not, you lie at anchor and use the tender, which is frequently the better experience in any case.
The evening is the moment. Take the funicular up to the Piazzetta after seven, once the last hydrofoil has gone and the island's population drops back to a few thousand. Dinner on a terrace above the Faraglioni — Il Pirata has been a reliable favourite for years — and back aboard by tender under the cliffs.
The same island, differently
Nothing about Capri has to be endured. The crowds are real, but they are concentrated into about six hours of the day and roughly a kilometre of the coastline, and both are easy to step around when you are not dependent on a ferry.
Guests are often surprised by how quiet it feels. It is the same island everyone else is visiting. You are just there at a different hour.
Capri sits within easy reach of Salerno, Amalfi and Positano, so it works as a day out as readily as it works inside a longer week. Tell us which you have in mind and we will suggest the yacht that suits it.
