Madeira Diving Center

Felix and Carlota Waschkewitz run Madeira Diving Center from Caniço de Baixo, the base Felix's mother Gertrud opened as Madeira's first dive centre in 1980 and the family has run for two generations since. The centre owns its premises in the Edifício Contrata, a block it shares with a supermarket and a bakery, not a hotel lobby, and Gertrud now runs the Sunshine holiday apartments in the same building for divers who want to stay where they dive.

Dives are organised into three price zones by distance from the base and picked up by van from the diver's Caniço accommodation, not run from one fixed house reef. The closest zone holds the Blue Hole, a tunnel cave entered at 8m and exited at 18m, where a resident conger eel and, occasionally, a monk seal share the passage with gold-striped seabream. Further out at Garajau, stacked rock formations open into caves, and two tame, resident groupers big enough to fill a photo frame have names: Elvis and Toni.

Madeira Diving Center is an SSI-affiliated centre and an authorised Mares rental partner, with two Bauer compressors and an on-site nitrox station behind its own equipment fleet, renewed annually. Boat dives, including the scuttled Corveta Afonso Cerqueira wreck inside the Garajau reserve, go out on a cooperation partner's boat; the centre runs its own shore programme by van, with ladder-free entries at each site. Payment is cash only, and booked packages and courses are non-refundable.

What recurs across reviews of Madeira Diving Center is not one instructor but a family. Parents book a child's first dive here for a pace built around the diver, not the clock: a family of seven split across two instructors with one-to-one attention for an eleven-year-old, and a ten-year-old's own first certified dive credited by name to instructor Sofia. Felix and Carlota, who run the centre day to day, are named just as often, years apart across independent accounts. Marine life comes up often too: octopus, seahorses, starfish, barracuda and the resident groupers at Garajau. One account, from 2023, found the diving itself unremarkable despite friendly service, and did not dive with the centre again.