Las Calles

At the buoy the bottom is 12 metres down, on top of one of the rock walls, with a clean sandy street running off to each side. One flank falls away vertically and the other slides gently into sand. Swimming west along the base, the deeper side, leads past the anchor field to the gaps that cut the wall about every hundred metres, each some twenty metres wide. The way back runs along the crest, among sea cucumbers, urchins and schools of bogue, with the anchor line coming back into view on the rock. Across the site the range is 8 to 18 metres, and the layout allows different routes.

A wall about five metres high, so thickly covered in red sponge that it looks carpeted, gives the dive its colour. Orange Astroides wedges in between the sponges and white gorgonians grow along the foot and down the slope. Along the base lie anchors of many kinds, U-shaped and V-shaped, Roman stocks, admiralty anchors and grapnels, probably left by ships that sheltered in the lee of the island before it was joined to the mainland. Life is richest at the gaps in the wall, where shrimp hide in the rock and sand, almost always with electric rays beside them.

Las Calles is one of the dive points where the park's 2024 plan makes diving subject to authorisation. Grades run from easy to medium, and the corridors give shelter from current. The risk here is the layout: changing street disorients and lengthens the swim back to the boat. Keep a depth or compass reference at each junction, return along the top of the wall for a different view, and turn the dive early, at about 120 bar.