El Toro

Three pieces of seabed sit within a few fin-kicks of each other at El Toro: a shallow rocky plateau, a steep wall below it and a long slope running out from the wall to 35 or 40 metres. Boats tie to one of six official buoys, and the buoy sets the dive. Buoys 1 and 2 lie away from the islet in Cala Rafalbeig, east of Munt de Pedres. Buoys 3 to 6 ring the islet itself, and buoy 3 hangs off the inner east side at 39°27.747' N / 2°28.362' E.1

The plateau sits at 5 to 7 metres, depending on which operator is asked. From it a group crosses a few metres to the wall, which drops steeply to about 15 metres before easing into the slope. The 15 to 20 metre band is where most of the dive happens and is the part Open Water divers do; operators describe deeper dives down the slope at 35 to 40 metres, with a maximum of 40 or 42 metres depending on the operator. Groupers hold their place in the open water, morays and congers sit in the crevices of the wall, and octopuses guard their dens with stones pulled across the entrance. The safety stop goes back on the plateau, where parrotfish tend to drift over to the group. A sector of the north-west side, between Clot des Moro and els Pans, is closed to recreational diving, so no route heads that way.

The recovery here has been measured. Grouper biomass at the islet is up to 52 times what it was in 2004 and brown meagre (corvallo) biomass up to 284 times, and in 2020 the biomass of fish vulnerable to fishing around El Toro was the highest ever recorded anywhere on the Balearic coast.2 On the slope that shows as large resident groupers over the rock and the Posidonia.

The islet is also dived to a plan. Only the six buoys are used, each with a cap on divers, which keeps any one group small.

In autumn the water below the thermocline fills with barracuda. Hundreds gather between the islet and the open blue and cross back and forth. Operators recommend spring and autumn for the site.

Two caps govern the islet: 12 divers per point and visit, and never more than 48 in the water at once around the islet. Night diving is banned for individual divers in the high-protection zone.

Current and shipping traffic are the two complications operators name, which makes an ascent on a deployed marker buoy matter more here than on a sheltered reef. Below 30 metres on the slope is a different dive from the shallower part of the site: gas and no-deco time run down faster, and the water at its foot sits near 14 to 16 C while the surface reaches 25 to 27 C in summer.

Recreational diving inside caves is not allowed in the Toro zone.