Cathedral

You enter from Playa Chica beach and drop onto a volcanic shelf where moray eels work the cracks and octopus settle into lava pockets. The route runs left along a wall that steps down past alcoves of finger coral and small shrimp. After about ten minutes of swim a sandy gap interrupts the wall; cross it and the seabed falls away to the drop-off. The cavern entrance opens at twenty-eight metres, ten metres wide on the wall to your left. Inside, the space widens into the dome — sponge-encrusted ceiling, sand floor, glass fish hanging near the back, light pouring in behind you from the entrance. Look up and the bubble garden becomes visible: silver pools of exhaled air finding their way up through porous basalt and trapped against the rock. Recreational profiles spend five to ten minutes in or just outside the cavern before turning back along the wall at a shallower depth, where on the deeper edge black coral becomes visible below forty metres for those equipped for it. The return shallows toward garden-eel sand patches on the way home.

Among the named routes that launch from the Playa Chica entry — and there are at least six of them — Cathedral is the deep-cavern option. Veril de Playa Chica delivers the wall, Blue Hole delivers the light shaft, the muelle delivers the sheltered training shallow. Cathedral specifically delivers an overhead chamber at recreational depth from a beach walk-in. The site's species character — black coral, narwhal shrimp, and resident dusky groupers — is what makes it one of the named cavern dives along this wall. Felix, the famous resident grouper, lived here for years and hovered for cameras close enough to fill a wide-angle frame. Felix is gone now, but large groupers still hold the entrance, and the bubble-garden curiosity above the roof is a geological detail that few caverns anywhere replicate. Among the Lanzarote shore-entry circuit, divers pick Cathedral out as a must-do.

Depth is the binding constraint. At 28-32m, expect 25-35 minutes of total dive time depending on air management and profile; nitrox extends this and several Puerto del Carmen centres include or offer it. A torch is essential, not optional — the sponge colour on the dome is muted without artificial light, and the macro along the reef route is invisible without a beam. The cavern is daylit and functions as a large overhang rather than a true penetration, but buoyancy still matters: ceiling contact damages sponge colonies that have taken years to develop, and the sand floor silts up quickly with poor finning. Standard kit applies — dive computer, SMB for ascent on the wall return, booties for shore entry across volcanic rock. Winter brings cooler water, around 18°C, and a credible chance of angel sharks resting on the sandy stages of the route in November through March.