ArtExplorer catamaran turns Cascais Marina into a floating art venue

Cascais Marina in Portugal turned into a floating art venue when ArtExplorer arrived with the Art Explora Festival, bringing free programming ashore and onboard through June 28. The June 25 stop drew art, sailing and design into the same waterfront scene, and the catamaran itself became the centerpiece.

ArtExplorer is the largest aluminum sailing catamaran in the world, a 47-meter vessel with a maximum beam of 17.10 meters. That scale gives it the presence of a major superyacht, but the multihull platform also creates the wide, open deck spaces that make public programming feel possible instead of improvised. The boat’s pedigree is as strong as its footprint: Perini Navi built it under The Italian Sea Group umbrella, Guillaume Verdier handled naval architecture, and Axel de Beaufort shaped both the exterior and the interior.

That combination mattered in Cascais because the stop was not presented as a private yacht display. It functioned as a traveling cultural site, with events spread between the marina and the ship, and with the festival working in collaboration with Culturgest. Filipa Oliveira and Raquel Ribeiro dos Santos curated the program, which gave the landing a clear public-facing identity rather than a purely nautical one.

For Catamaran Yachts readers, the striking detail is not only that a very large sailing catamaran was present, but what it was doing. ArtExplorer used its size, stability and broad beam to host people instead of simply carrying them, turning the marina into a temporary meeting point for a nontraditional audience that came for art as much as for the boat. The vessel’s superyacht-grade build, paired with a festival model that could move by sea, made the case for multihulls as cultural platforms in their own right.

In Cascais, the boat did more than moor. It framed the waterfront as a place where a 47-meter catamaran could pull in visitors, hold attention and give a marina the feel of a live venue, with the hull, decks and port setting all working as part of the experience.