Ductility of open piled wharves under reversed cyclic loads has been investigated. Experimental testing of five wharf models having a scale of about 1:4 was conducted under the application of horizontal reversed cyclic loading. The experiments were designed to focus on the horizontal ultimate load, ductility and failure mode of the considered wharf models. Nonlinear numerical analyses using the finite element method were also performed on numerical models representing the experimentally tested wharves. The results of the experimental tests showed that open piled wharves possessed favourable ductile behaviour and that their load bearing capacity did not depreciate until a ductility factor of 3 to 4 was reached. The numerical analysis showed that the relative rotation that took place at the joints between the steel piles and the R.C. beam was responsible for a considerable portion of the total horizontal deformation of the wharves. Therefore, it was concluded that introducing the joint stiffness in calculating the deformations of open piled wharves was important to achieve reasonable accuracy.