When someone mentioned to me in the dive club “Cabo de Palos” in Spain and that they were going on their annual dive trip to here in June, the first thing that came to my mind was, “where exactly is this place, and why have I not heard of it before”. Well it turned out to be one of the best places I have dived, just a few hours up the coast in Spain from where we live!
The BSAC club I belong to, travel to Cabo de Palos annually in June, sometimes more than once a year. It is a 5 hour drive from Gibraltar, and I soon found myself leaving work and heading straight to here one afternoon in June. The place is off the beaten track, hidden away from largely populated cities. It almost felt like if I had travelled back in time to the 1980’s.
We used a dive centre called Planeta Azul. We did two dives most days. The diving was mostly on large sea mounts, some raising up as much as 50 metres off the seabed. The area is a protected Marine Nature Reserve. Here we found large shoals of barracudas circling the top of the mounts, and everywhere we looked, there was a massive grouper. Hundreds of them everywhere! I have never seen nothing like this before. To think of all those times I have heard the rumours; “the Mediterranean is dead”, well this showed a completely different story.
There was a fairly good size wreck called the “El Naranjito” which we also dived. I love wrecks! She lies in 42m on her deepest point. We also got the chance to do a larger wreck, which was 1 hour away by boat. She is called “El Carbonero” and lies in 45 metres of water. Unfortunately the visibility was very poor that day and if it wouldn’t have been for by powerful strobes firing of my camera, we wouldn’t have seen the wreck at all!
To sum the trip up, it was an amazing place I had discovered, and I planned on coming back again this year to try “El Carbonero” wreck again and also some other mounts and wrecks we were not able to do this time round.