B24 Liberator PB4Y

Drop onto sand and mud roughly 2-3km off Faro and follow a marked cable through a debris field, not a single hull. Five signposted stops carry you from a shallower front section around 13m toward a marked section at 21m, where two complete wings, 34m combined span, lie upside down on the seabed, the engines and the cavities that once held the landing gear still recognisable. The fuselage itself was never found. Two propellers, a motor rotor and a vertical rudder sit apart from the main structure and are worked into the same route. Conger eels hold in the wreckage, spinous spider crabs and a European lobster or two work the debris, and rainbow wrasse, one of the species named on the route's own interpretive plaques, move over structure that has sat here since 1943.

The Algarve's one WWII aircraft wreck carries documentation rare for a site its size: a named US Navy bureau number, a named crew list, a university PhD case study built around this exact route, and an active heritage-search programme that keeps producing new chapters. The Faro sector's other named wreck, Navio do IPIMAR, is the opposite kind of site: a trawler deliberately scuttled intact in 1995, its interior cleared for penetration. Here there is no hull to enter at all, only scattered debris turned into a signposted 250m course, and a research history still being written: a sonar survey in 2022, a search for the missing crew in 2024, a hyperspectral-camera study in 2026.

On the night of 30 November 1943 the Liberator (BuNo 63931) ran low on fuel and lost its position when the crew's radio direction-finder locked onto a Seville frequency they mistook for their own base; it ditched in the sea off Faro, short of land. How many of the eleven crew died is disputed and stays disputed here: named-individual sources put it at six survivors and five dead, unnamed catalog sources reverse the figures. In 2008, CCMAR, the University of Algarve's marine science centre, and the Hidroespaco dive school laid a signposted route across the wreckage under an ecotourism programme, and re-marked it with five identification plaques in August 2012.1 A 2013 University of Algarve PhD thesis used the route as one of two case studies in a survey of 106 divers, documenting the wing and engine layout and the species visible from each plaque.2 An international team ran a side-scan sonar survey of the wreck in October 2022, and in September 2024 US military personnel worked alongside a CNANS archaeologist on an eighteen-person underwater search for the missing crew's remains. Most recently, in July 2026, the EdgeLab research group scanned the wreck with a hyperspectral camera under the THETIDA project, working with the University of Algarve and the Centro Ciencia Viva do Algarve to assess how the wreck and its surrounding ecosystem have changed.

A diving certification and a local guide are required on every dive here, and every source found treats the wreck the same way: scattered historic material that is not to be moved, with no penetration because there is no intact structure to enter. This page grades the dive to Advanced Open Water: the route's far end runs several metres beyond what Open Water certification covers, and no operator states a level itself. Coordinates are approximate; an academic citation for the site sits under a kilometre from the position given above, corroboration at the scale every source describes, not an exact fix. At least two independent operators list this exact site and both book it by direct inquiry, with price quoted per booking.