Navio do IPIMAR

Descend onto sand off Faro, on the calmer, eastern end of the Algarve, to a single intact hull resting where it was deliberately sunk in 1995, listing gently to one side. Divers follow corridors through an interior that was cleared of machinery when the wreck was prepared, working the full length of the hull, not just its exterior. Around the structure, shoals of pouting and black seabream work the iron, with large conger eels holding in the compartments and spider crabs sharing the same crevices; unnamed soft growth softens the metal further out. A single catalog listing puts the hull at roughly 45 metres long and 7 metres high, a figure that has not been checked against an official vessel register.

Within the Algarve's run of named wrecks, most are war losses: older iron and steel hulls that went down decades ago and now sit broken and current-exposed. This trawler is different on both counts. It was sunk on purpose, five years after a wider IPIMAR reef-building program began off this same stretch of coast, specifically to create habitat and a dive site. And it survives whole, an intact hull with a cleared interior divers can follow end to end.

An iron fishing trawler, sunk here in 1995 on the orders of IPIMAR, the Portuguese Institute for Fisheries and Sea Research (now folded into IPMA), to build an artificial reef. The sinking sits inside a wider institutional program: an academic paper describes an Algarve artificial-reef system that IPIMAR established as a pilot project in 1990, with concrete-module installations several kilometres off Faro and a separate cluster off Olhão. That 1990 program built concrete modules, and this trawler went down five years later under the same institutional name. The two projects share an institution, a stretch of seabed and a fisheries-habitat purpose, but they are two different kinds of structure built five years apart: related programs under one institution, each with its own installation.

The interior is penetrable, and that is the main reason less experienced divers are steered elsewhere: the catalog listing that names this site rates it outright for more experienced divers, and the operator's own description, though it avoids that phrase, backs the same guidance by presenting the cleared interior as a route to follow end to end. Depth adds a secondary margin against recreational no-decompression limits toward the deeper end of the profile. No marine reserve, permit or diver quota applies to this wreck specifically, consistent with the rest of the Algarve coast.