Furia sailboats: two unrelated boats share a name
"Furia sailboats" covers two completely unrelated boats. The one most buyers will meet is the Spanish production line built at Lliçà de Vall, near Barcelona -- first as Dresport, later renamed Furia Yacht S.A. -- a run of fiberglass cruiser-racers built from 1978 into the early 1990s under a succession of Catalan and French designers. The other is a single Italian one-off, a laminated-wood ocean racer launched in 1975 by the Italian yard and designer Cantiere Santarelli, sharing nothing with the Spanish boats but the name. The two are kept separate throughout what follows.
Origins and ownership
Dresport was founded in 1978 by Alberto Cabal and Jaime Piqué, who had split off from the Nao-Glass/INERGA group that built Puma sailboats during that company's own late-1970s crisis, covered on Puma's own page. Cabal and Piqué, together with the warehouse chief and other employees, rented facilities at Lliçà de Vall and set up Dresport (Drassanes Esportives S.A.) to build the new Furia 28. About two years later Cabal split off again to found a separate yard building the Falcon; Piqué stayed on as Furia's director for the rest of the company's life. In 1982 Dresport reached a private agreement with its creditors -- a full year's halt on activities and liquidation of non-fixed assets -- to pay down a 90-million-peseta debt. A November 1987 filing renamed the company Furia Yacht S.A., and under that name it operated until closing; Club Furia's own history of the yard gives slightly different years for the closure but places it consistently in the early 1990s, part of a wider wave of Spanish-yard failures that also swept up Laraya, Northwind, and Viudes. Spain's 1986 entry into the European Community and the tariff reductions that followed hit the nautical sector broadly through the decade, and Dresport/Furia Yacht was no exception. Afterward, the successor firm Ola Astilleros absorbed workers and assets from Viudes, Furia, and Puma to resume building the Northwind line.
The Italian "Furia" has no connection to any of this. It was a single boat, designed and built by the Italian yard Cantiere Santarelli under naval architect Ettore Santarelli, launched in 1975 as a Sixth Class IOR entry in laminated wood rather than fiberglass, and went on to win the Italian Sixth Class championship that same year -- a one-off prototype, in the words of the Italian classic-boat magazine Giornale della Vela, not a series design.
The designers
Cabal, before departing, had designed the original Furia 28 and Furia 33 that launched the line in 1978. Everything after that carried the credit of a single outside partnership: the French design office of Michel Joubert and Bernard Nivelt, who authored what Mar Abierto called the yard's second generation -- the Furia 32, 37, and 1000 -- and went on to sign the Furia 44 as well. Joubert-Nivelt also drew the Furia 3/4 for the 1982 Three-Quarter Ton World Championship in Denia, and returned in 1991 with a completely new design for the Furia 372, featuring a more vertical stem, a much higher prismatic coefficient, and a wider stern than the boats it followed.
Construction through the eras
The Furia 3/4 racing model was marketed by Dresport but actually built at the Barracuda shipyard rather than at Lliçà de Vall. The Furia 37 was offered in Standard and Regata versions, with an elliptical keel and rudder, tiller steering as standard (a wheel was optional), fine bow sections, and a wide stern. The range's largest model, the Furia 44, was built in fiberglass reinforced with Kevlar and unidirectional laminates. Mar Abierto dated the 37 family -- including its later 382, 372, and 392 versions -- to a 1981-to-1994 production span, while Club Furia's own history places the 37's public debut in 1984 alongside the Furia 32.
Lines and generations
The range began in 1978 with the Furia 28, designed by Cabal, and the Furia 33; Dresport gradually lengthened its lineup from there. An entry-level Furia 25 followed in 1981, aimed at first-time buyers, and the range later filled out below its larger models with the 25, 26, and 302 -- the 302 introduced at the 1989 Barcelona Boat Show. The Furia 32, presented in 1984, sold around two hundred units by Mar Abierto's count before being renamed the Furia 332 two years later, distinguished mainly by a different stern. Joubert-Nivelt's Furia 37 gave way in turn to the 382, the 372, and the 392, later versions that reused and improved on the 37's hull, with the 372 representing a fully new design rather than an update. At the top of the range, the Furia 1000 -- also sold as the motorsailer-oriented Furia 1040 -- marked a shift away from Dresport's earlier sport-oriented boats when it launched in the early 1980s; professionals consulted by Mar Abierto estimated its total production at around fifty units. The Furia 44 followed in 1986-87, ordered by close to ten buyers in its first year and roughly twenty over its full run. Two further lineup entries, a D25 dated 1976 and a 1/4 Ton dated 1977-1980, predate Dresport's founding and carry no further attribution here. Across the whole range, Mar Abierto put total production at roughly 500 boats.
Who Furia is for
Buyers exploring Furia sailboats need to know which one they mean. The Spanish production range -- entry-level Cabal-designed boats through Joubert-Nivelt's later cruiser-racers -- represents a mainstream 1980s Spanish yard's full arc, shaped as much by two economic crises and a corporate rename as by any single design philosophy. The Italian Santarelli one-off sits at the opposite extreme: a single laminated-wood IOR racer built to compete, not to be reproduced. For most sailors researching "Furia," the Spanish Dresport/Furia Yacht range, and its Joubert-Nivelt design pedigree in particular, is the one that matters.
