Les Illes Hotel & Diving

Carrer de les Illes 55 sits directly across from L'Estartit's harbour. The hotel has been family-run for more than 60 years and added its dive centre in 1985, consolidating rooms, board, and diving under one ownership. That is the pitch the centre's own pages lead with: one booking covers the stay, the meals, and the diving from a single address opposite the marina.

A typical day runs around four boat departures. Divers walk five minutes to the harbour while a small van shuttles gear, then a ten-minute crossing reaches the Medes Islands. The rhythm leans hotel-paced rather than premium-boutique: breakfast at the hotel, gear-up, two morning dives, lunch back on site, and afternoon options when divers are booked on the multi-day pack. The mix on board is broad: try-dives, Open Water and Advanced courses, refresher dives, and routine fun-dives for certified divers, with Nitrox available as a speciality. The technical-leaning sites in the Medes (Pota de Llop at 50 m, Pedra de Déu at 45 m, La Vaca to 45 m) sit on the centre's published list for advanced-certified divers using Nitrox, but specialist tec, cave, and wreck programmes are not the centre's identity.

Two 12-yard boats, L'ILLA and L'ILLA II, are rated up to 40 persons including crew, with dual 90 HP engines, VHF radio, oxygen rescue sets, and zodiac rescue boats. The centre holds PADI, SSI, and PSI (CMAS/CEDIP) certifications and is a Green Diving Spain member. Equipment rental covers all sizes, and a Mares partnership has been mentioned by long-term divers for new-gear testing. Guides and instructors speak English, Spanish, Italian, German, and French. The website does not publish a team page; named guides surface in reviews rather than on a formal About/Team page.

Diver feedback splits along a clear time axis. From the early 2010s through to roughly 2018, repeat visitors and experienced divers praised three things consistently: a knowledgeable team that quickly read divers' competence and gave more freedom on later dives, two boats described as comfy and not too big relative to other L'Estartit operators, and a personal-service tone reinforced by the hotel-and-dive bundle. The Google rating of 4.1 across more than 500 ratings carries that older sentiment forward at scale.

From 2023 onward a different cluster of feedback recurs: boat overcrowding with reports of 27-30 divers per departure, missing or weak safety hardware (railings, cylinder holders) on what reviewers describe as the larger boat configuration, and inconsistent helpfulness from non-managerial crew. Even the more critical recent reviews name individual staff (Anna, Maelle, Marcos) approvingly while criticising the operational set-up around them, which suggests the friction is structural (boat capacity, deck layout, ratio decisions) rather than a personnel issue. Photographers and experienced divers continue to praise freedom of movement and exhaustive briefings into 2023. The pattern that emerges is a centre whose hotel-and-dive model and Medes-area knowledge remain strong, with operational pressure showing on the busiest peak-season departures.