Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris is opening a 93-room five-star resort in Mykonos after his first hotel shut down

Naguib Sawiris closed one hotel on Mykonos and is opening another. The second one is considerably larger.

The Egyptian billionaire's Silversands Mykonos resort is expected to open in May 2027, according to ProtoThema, a leading Greek news outlet. The development in Kalo Livadi on the island's southeastern coast features 93 accommodation units including five standalone villas, six swimming pools, and a signature entertainment space called the Floating Rock Bar, designed to appear suspended above the Aegean Sea.

The opening timeline arrives with a specific context. Sawiris' previous Mykonos venture, YI Mykonos, a boutique hotel launched in 2023 in the Elia area with 41 rooms and private pools, ceased operations at the end of 2024. The property has remained inactive through the entire 2025 season and into 2026. Sawiris has not publicly addressed the closure or the transition between the two projects.

Silversands Mykonos is part of the rapidly growing Silversands Hotels and Resorts collection that Sawiris has been building through his ORA Developers group. The brand already operates in Grenada in the Caribbean, where a flagship five-star property sits on Grand Anse beach, and in Egypt through the Silversands North Coast development on the Mediterranean coast.

The Mykonos project is positioned at the upper end of the island's luxury market, which is itself at an inflection point. Mykonos has experienced four consecutive years of uncertainty since 2022, pressured by high prices, infrastructure complaints during peak season and most recently by the geopolitical fallout from Middle East tensions following the Iran conflict that broke out in late February 2026. International bookings slowed sharply from March onward and the 2026 season began with declining passenger traffic.

Despite that environment, Sawiris is not the only billionaire-backed name pressing ahead on the island. Four Seasons launched in June 2026 in partnership with AGC, Fouquet's from France's Barrière Group is arriving in collaboration with Yoda Group, and Accor's MGallery brand has partnered with the Daktylides family, one of Mykonos' most established hospitality dynasties. Market executives cited by ProtoThema describe the wave of new investment as a deliberate repositioning of the destination, timed for the years beyond the current uncertainty.

Sawiris, whose net worth sits at approximately $7.3 billion according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, has been diversifying his investments aggressively in 2026, including a major expansion of ORA Developers' Bayn project in Abu Dhabi to $8.17 billion and a near-Pyramids hotel development in Egypt approaching $150 million. Silversands Mykonos is the latest piece of a hospitality portfolio he has been quietly assembling across three continents since 2016.