Cap d'or

The watchtower above marks the headland long before you're in the water, and the dive underneath earns the comparison: rocky vertical walls dressed in colourful anemones, sheltered from the north by the headland's own bulk. One route on the west side starts around 10m and leads to a cave, descending toward 20m where a torch starts to matter, before opening onto the dive's centrepiece: a tunnel swim-through. Along the wall generally, sargo and oblada hold near the rock face among feather-duster worms, while rays and cuttlefish turn up reliably once the terrain flattens onto the sandy base beyond.

Cap d'Or earns its place as Moraira's default mid-level dive by combining three things a simple wall dive rarely has together: a genuine historical landmark overhead, a photogenic swim-through below it, and a dependable sandy-base encounter with rays and cuttlefish. The 16th-century watchtower was built to warn of pirate raids along this coast, which gives the site a story most reef walls don't carry. It sits deliberately between two extremes: gentler than the deeper 28m point further along the headland, and a world away from the technical cave diving at nearby Cova dels Arcs.

A torch is worth carrying for the cave and tunnel sections, where natural light thins out well before the passage opens again. A 5mm wetsuit covers the summer water; step up to 7mm or a drysuit once winter sets in. An SMB is standard practice here as elsewhere on this coast, particularly if the route takes you out toward the deeper advanced point.