Diving in Cozumel

Three of the park's fourteen reef complexes are resting at any given moment, in blocks of roughly two months, and which three depends on when you come. The rotation runs in a repeating order, so Chankanaab tends to rest in midwinter, Cedral and La Francesa in late winter, Dalila and two Palancar sections in spring, Paraíso in early summer, Palancar Cuevas and Ladrillos with Colombia in late summer, and San Francisco and Santa Rosa in autumn. Treat that as the shape and not the schedule. No government page publishes the year's calendar; the park announces each cycle as it starts and dive shops and the local press pass it on, so ask your operator which reefs are open for your dates before you build a week around one of them.

225 pesos per person per day for 2026, indexed from 225.56 and charged rounded to the nearest five, and no, not everyone pays it. Entry is a federal duty under Article 198 of the Ley Federal de Derechos, not a price the park sets, and the law gives Mexican nationals and foreign residents in Mexico a 50% reduction on proof of nationality or residence, with 75% off for students and teachers and full exemption for under-12s, people with a disability, INAPAM cardholders, pensioners and retirees. Divers and snorkellers pay the same rate. It is collected through your dive shop as a wristband good for one day, and shops usually quote it in dollars at around 10 to 13 a day, which is their own conversion of the peso figure. The rate moves: it was 108.66 pesos in 2024. If you spend more than about seventeen days a year inside Mexican protected areas, the annual Pasaporte de la Conservacion at 3,760 pesos covers all of them except Revillagigedo.

Yes, with the caveat that you should not start at the wrong end of the island. The current here almost always pushes you along the reef instead of against it, which makes drift diving easier to learn than its reputation suggests, and the inner reefs at Paraíso, Chankanaab, Yucab and Tormentos run mild at 10 to 20 m. Palancar Gardens and the shallow section at Colombia are also within reach on a calm day. What is not is the far south: Punta Sur, Colombia's deep wall and Maracaibo carry midwater current strong and unpredictable enough that a boat can miss the site entirely, on top of profiles past 30 m. Operators route new divers to the inner reefs by default, and a shop that watches you dive for a few days before offering more is doing its job.

Water sits at 25 to 27 C in winter, 27 to 28 C in spring and autumn and 28 to 30 C from June to October, with deeper reef sites a degree or two cooler than the surface. A 3 mm full suit works all year, though repetitive diving in January and February is more comfortable with a 5 mm or a hooded vest, and January mornings have measured as low as 24 C. Visibility is the reason people come back: 30 m is a very good day, 20 to 25 m is normal, and the dry season from November to May holds the best of it. The 45 to 60 m figures that circulate in marketing are not what to plan on. Sargassum belongs to the beach conversation on this coast and not to the diving one, and what operators name for a poor-visibility day is rain and freshwater runoff.

On the second, shallow dive of the morning, not on a special trip. The species lives at 8 to 25 m and usually 10 to 15, wedged into a den under a coral head at the sand-and-rubble edge of the reef, and the giveaway is the sloping patch of sand outside the hole. By day you see the face and not much else: a flat head with yellow fins and blue and white stripes. Guides on the inner reefs know individual dens and will point them out. It is listed by the IUCN as Endangered, an assessment made in 2012 and flagged by the IUCN itself as needing updating, and it is found almost nowhere else and reliably only here. The park's rules prohibit disturbing or removing marine organisms in any way and single out animals in their refuges, which is exactly what a toadfish in its den is5. Some guides still coax them out with a lure or a mirror. Flash is not addressed either way. A fish this scarce is better photographed where it lives.

Not on the deepest one, and this catches people out because the intuition runs the other way. EAN32, the standard mix on the island, has a maximum operating depth of 33.8 m at a PO2 of 1.4, which is shallower than the Devil's Throat exit at 35 to 43 m. Diving it on 32% would put you past the oxygen limit at exactly the moment you are hovering below the exit waiting for the rest of the group, and experienced local divers deliberately save their one air fill of the trip for that dive. Nitrox earns its keep on the repetitive shallow dives, where it buys no-decompression time on the second and third tanks of the day. Gas volume is the real constraint at the deep end, which is why larger steel cylinders are a standing local request.

El Norte is the winter north wind, and it can. When it blows the port closes and no boat leaves, sometimes for days, and it turns up most often between December and March. That is the same window sold as peak season for visibility, and both things are true at once: the clearest water and the strongest current arrive with the weather most likely to stop you diving. Divers who come here regularly in winter build spare days into the trip, and some prefer the shoulder months of March to June and November for that reason. Hurricane season is a separate risk, running 1 June to 30 November and peaking in September.

Ask the shop you are booking with, and treat their answer as the current one. Two authorities sit over that dive, not one. The park's management programme allows night diving on the reefs it names for it, and prohibits it outright in the restricted-use zone that covers Punta Sur and Colombia5. Taking a boat out of San Miguel after dark is the port authority's permission to give rather than the park's, which is why the answer can change without anything in the park's rules changing. Night dives on the inner reefs are sold on the island, so ask your operator what is running before you plan an evening around one.

No, and it is not what it was either. Stony coral tissue loss disease reached these reefs around 2018 and some park reefs lost up to 90% of the coral species susceptible to it, with brain corals the visible casualty: the affected ones are now rock with algae over them. Divers who have come here for fifteen years disagree openly about the trend since, some describing the best conditions they have seen after the closures and the pandemic quiet, others saying they stopped coming. Both are describing real dives. What is documented is a reef under pressure with a management response running against it, which is what the rotating closures are, and a reef line long enough that condition varies a lot between sites.

Nurse sharks, and not much else. They sleep under ledges and on the sand and are a routine sighting on the inner reefs, but Cozumel is not a shark destination and divers who come here regularly say so plainly. The bull shark aggregation that people associate with this coast is at Playa del Carmen, on the mainland across the channel, and Cozumel operators sell it as a ferry day trip off the island, not as a dive here. The same applies to whale sharks, which gather far offshore of Isla Mujeres in summer as a snorkelling trip where diving is not permitted. What you get here instead is eagle rays at the north end in winter, turtles all year and the toadfish.

Yes, two of them, both hospital-based and both in San Miguel. One belongs to the Costamed hospital and the other to Cozumel International Hospital, which opened the island's first chamber in 1987. Higher counts you may see quoted for the island fold in hyperbaric oxygen therapy units at clinics, which treat other conditions and are not the same facility. Carry dive insurance with hyperbaric cover regardless, confirm with your operator which hospital they use, and remember that the far-south sites are a long boat ride from town.