Belliure sailboats: a Spanish family yard that built both production cruisers and one-off superyachts
Belliure is a family shipyard from Calpe, on Spain's Alicante coast, whose history splits into two distinct chapters: two decades building wooden fishing boats, followed by a fiberglass era that produced both a small-series line of 30-to-50-foot cruising sailboats and a handful of large, one-off sailing yachts that the yard's own history describes as among the biggest hulls built with the most advanced technology and materials in the world at the time.
Origins and ownership
Belliure's own history page dates the yard to 1953, when Vicente Belliure founded it in Calpe. His brother Juan Belliure — youngest of six Belliure brothers, and later the yard's commercial director — recalled the founding differently: Vicente had already built a modest yard of his own at nineteen, at the mouth of a dry riverbed, and a torrential flood destroyed it that same year; only after Vicente asked their father for help did the family settle, a year later, on Calpe as the nearest town with a fishing port. The family financed the new yard by mortgaging the father's house for fifty thousand pesetas — ten thousand of which the lender took immediately as interest — and used the remaining forty thousand to buy their first tools. Vicente's older brother Jerónimo joined the following year, in 1954, leaving his job on the railway.
The yard's international reputation traces to 1975, when Vicente and his two older brothers sold a two-masted carbon-fiber sailboat before it had even reached the Barcelona Boat Show; they left the show having sold eight boats in total, and, per a later profile of Vicente Belliure, the Belliure name began trading worldwide from that point on. Decades later, per that same 2020 profile, Vicente — then 87 — was eventually forced to sell the company to Marine Spirit after being unable to repay debts he incurred from laying off ninety employees.
The designers
Naval architect Peter Ibold designed Belliure's 30, 35, 40, 41, and 50-foot fiberglass sailing yachts, working with Vicente Belliure's cooperation. Ibold founded his own Paris-based design office in 1970, after his own amateur-built Endurance 35 won an international boatbuilding contest sponsored by the Amateur Yacht Research Society; besides Belliure, his sailboats, powerboats, motoryachts, and workboats were built by Stratimer in France and Colvic Craft in the UK. The Endurance 35 name recurs in Belliure's own story, too — Vicente Belliure separately built an Endurance 35 to an American engineer's plans, after concluding that a self-designed boat would carry no value in the nautical market.
At the start of the 1980s, Belliure began a new line designed by naval engineer Ron Holland: the 63SY, 83SY, 86SY, and 66SY. The only Belliure 86 built — later renamed Orion, and known at points along the way as Jubilee VII, Sapphire, and Jubilee of St Peter Port — was delivered in 1986 and designed by Ron Holland Design, which also completed her naval architecture; a sister yacht, Thalassi, followed in 1985.
Construction through the eras
From 1953 to 1974, Belliure built more than 160 wooden fishing boats, ranging from 70 to 350 tons displacement and all designed in-house. The yard created a leisure-boats division in 1974 and introduced Fibreglass Reinforced Plastic construction, marking its shift away from wooden shipbuilding. To build the Ron Holland-designed yachts that followed, Belliure modernized its premises to work polyester and epoxy resins, new glass fibers, Kevlar, carbon, and sandwich laminates; the 83SY became the first yacht in the world built with a single-mold system using Kevlar and sandwich reinforcement, pioneering that method in Spain. Those larger Holland-designed yachts were engineered with resistance and structural calculations at the highest level, specially prepared to sail in polar seas.
Lines and generations
Two distinct lines run through Belliure's fiberglass era. The Ibold-designed cruising line — the 30, 35, 40, 41, and 50 — spans roughly the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, all built to a shared design partnership between Ibold and Vicente Belliure. Alongside it, and built in far smaller numbers, sits the Holland-designed superyacht line of the early-to-mid 1980s, constructed with the modernized composite laminates the yard developed specifically for that work.
Who Belliure is for
Belliure suits sailors drawn to a small-series, family-yard-built Spanish cruiser in the 30-to-50-foot range from the Ibold and Vicente Belliure design partnership. It also appeals to a very different buyer: someone seeking one of the rare, large Ron Holland-designed one-offs built for high-latitude, high-spec offshore sailing rather than production cruising.
