Puma sailboats: a Barcelona yard that kept rebuilding itself
Puma was a Spanish sailboat marque built by Nao-Glass, a fiberglass-parts manufacturer based at Llisà del Vall, near Barcelona, and a division of the Spanish plastics company INERGA. Nao-Glass was founded in the early 1960s by Alberto Cabal, a plastics-industry manager and sailing enthusiast, and the Puma range went on to mark the history of Spanish and European boatbuilding between the 1960s and 1980s. Rather than one unbroken run, the marque survived at least two corporate crises, disappearing and being rebuilt more than once before it closed for good in the 1990s.
Origins and ownership
Cabal ran Nao-Glass as a manufacturer of plastics for various industries before turning it toward sailboats, and the yard's fortunes rose and fell with the wider business. A crisis in the late 1970s left INERGA nearly bankrupt, and out of it came a corporate split that sources tell two different ways. One account has Cabal and Nao-Glass's commercial director, Jaime Piqué, buying some of the Puma molds and setting up their own company, Dresport, to build different models under the Furia name, while Nao-Glass carried on building Puma. A separate, lower-confidence account instead holds that Nao-Glass itself was bought or replaced by Drassanes Esportivos S.A. in 1978, with the yard continuing sailboat production under the Yates Furia brand. Whichever version is closer to the truth, Puma was reborn from its own ashes more than once. A second crisis in the 1980s led to a new entity, Astilleros Puma, which absorbed part of Nao-Glass's old personnel and molds and built the final Puma 341 units before the marque disappeared for good in the 1990s.
The designers
Puma's early-1970s IOR boats -- the Puma 23 (1971), Puma 26 (1972), and Puma 34 (1975) -- came from the British design office Holman & Pye, headed by Kim Holman; the Puma 23 also reached British buyers under the name Jaguar 23, the same design sold into the UK export market. The Spanish outlet Mar Abierto credited the Puma 34 as the pillar of sales and prestige that kept the Nao-Glass yard active for almost twenty years, with more than 200 units built between 1975 and 1984. In its later years the yard moved away from Holman and brought in Ron Holland, who designed the Puma 27, and Angus Primrose, whose Puma 29 was his first commission for Nao-Glass -- both boats dated to 1979. The Puma 29 carried on into the yard's second era as well, with the last units built in 1988 and roughly a hundred built in total.
Construction through the eras
Nao-Glass built in fiberglass throughout its run. For the Puma 34, the yard adopted what was then a novel counter-mold construction system, later reinforcing the deck with a PVC sandwich layup to improve stability; the final Puma 341 series, distinguished mainly by a taller, more slender rig, was even offered as a kit for a few seasons. The Puma 37, built from 1981, paired a fiberglass hull with a fin keel and rudder on skeg.
Who Puma is for
Puma's reputation rested partly on racing: the UK boat-sales site Go-Sail credited Puma boats with a good reputation in races and said other Puma-built boats had won at many meets, and the marque's Mallorca dealer, náutica Tomás Darder, would return from editions of the Barcelona Boat Show having sold 50 or 60 boats at a time. That combination -- IOR pedigree from respected British and Irish designers, built by a mainstream Spanish production yard -- suits sailors drawn to compact, racing-bred cruisers from Spain's 1970s and 80s boatbuilding boom, with the understanding that any given hull's corporate lineage, whether Nao-Glass, the Dresport-era split, or Astilleros Puma, may take some digging to pin down.
