La Chimenea

A vertical shaft in the rock, roughly five metres across, drops divers from the anchor near 15-18 metres down to a floor between 33 and 35 metres, depending on which account of the site's history you go by. The German and Spanish descriptions of this same dive differ by a couple of metres at both ends, close enough that it barely matters once you're inside the shaft. At the bottom, a side opening leads into a chamber some divers call the living room, its floor and walls carpeted with red gorgonians and yellow fan corals. From there the route continues east into a canyon about 15 metres wide, crossed by three lava bridges thick enough to swim beneath rather than around. A tunnel system runs underneath the canyon floor, threading below the bridges before the route climbs back up toward the anchor point. Wrasses and moray eels work the crevices along the way, with barracuda occasionally crossing the open water above the canyon.

This was the first dive site Atlantik found after opening in 1994, back when the operator worked from two small inflatable boats and swept the seabed with a handheld echo-sounder instead of a proper boat's electronics. When the readout showed a sudden drop, the crew anchored and went to look. What they found was the chimney. The centre still describes the descent as diving like Santa Claus, dropping straight down the shaft before the exit spits divers out into the coral-carpeted room below. Within the wider Puerto de la Cruz cluster, that vertical drop is what sets this site apart from its neighbours: not a single chamber, not a maze of passages, just one shaft down and a canyon on the other side. The German name, Kamin, is still how some visitors know the site, even though La Chimenea is the name that has stuck locally.

Divers typically run this dive close to the edge of no-decompression limits, so gas planning matters more here than on a shallower reef dive. Advanced Open Water is the working minimum, and this isn't the site to try as a first taste of Advanced-level diving. A torch earns its place in a BCD pocket for the lava tunnel system beneath the canyon, even though most of the dive happens in open water and natural light. A 5mm wetsuit generally covers the site year-round. Visibility across this stretch of coast tends to run 15-30 metres and occasionally further, with April-June and September-November flagged as the strongest windows. Atlantik, the centre that discovered the site, still runs the trip regularly; expect roughly ten minutes on the water from the harbour.