The World’s Biggest Sailing Ship Finally Has a Buyer

The Golden Horizon has spent four years as one of the strangest sights in the Adriatic: a five-masted, square-rigged cruise ship, the largest of its kind ever built, sitting idle at a Croatian quay because nobody could agree on who owned her. That ended this month. The ship has been sold, reportedly for around 110 million euros, and AIS tracking showed her leaving Split earlier this week under her own power. She is scheduled to arrive in Valletta, Malta, on September 25 — the first purposeful voyage she has made since 2022.

The ship was built by Brodosplit in Croatia as a working replica of France II, the enormous French steel sailing barque completed in 1913 and still, on paper, the largest sailing ship ever built. Golden Horizon carries 35 sails across roughly 6,350 square metres of canvas and was designed for about 272 guests, a scale that put her in a category of exactly one. She sailed briefly for Tradewind Voyages before that operation collapsed, and the legal fight that followed between builder and charterer is what kept her alongside for so long.

The identity of the buyer has not been officially confirmed. Croatian outlets have reported it as a Swiss company operating a fleet of roughly 100 vessels, but neither the shipyard nor the purchaser has publicly named names, and there has been no announcement of a brand, a deployment or a booking date. Reports out of Croatia say the ship is expected to go straight into a refurbishment programme once she reaches Malta, which is consistent with a vessel that has been cold and largely unused for four winters.

For travellers, this matters mainly because ships like this almost never come back. Large-scale sail cruising is a tiny niche — Star Clippers, Sea Cloud and a handful of others — and every hull that leaves it tends to leave for good, sold for scrap or converted. A Golden Horizon returning to service would add real capacity to a segment that has effectively had none for half a decade. What nobody can say yet is where she will sail, what she will cost, or under whose flag and name she will do it.

Sources: Cruise Industry News, CruiseMapper