Palancar Bricks

The drop puts you on white sand where the reef breaks, with red brick scattered across it and at least two anchors among the pieces. Garden eels stand out of the flats on the channel side and slip back into their holes as the group passes.

The coral arrives in two steps. First a short wall, ten to fifteen metres tall and close inshore, with a second stretch of open sand beyond it. Then the main structure, starting around fourteen metres and running down to sand at twenty-seven. It comes as separate towers, tall formations with sand slopes falling away between them into blue water, so each gap is a decision and there is no edge to follow.

Early on there is a passage through the pinnacles, narrow and close to vertical. Not every guide takes a group into it, and everything beyond it can be reached around the outside. Past that point the site turns and behaves like a wall, cut with recesses and hung with more towers, and most dives bottom out near twenty-four metres. The sand throws the light back up under the coral. Two or three more passages come up towards the end if time and gas allow.

The finish is a climb onto the reef crest at six to nine metres, with the safety stop above it and open sand below.

Palancar Bricks sits on the seam where one reef ends and the next begins. A break in the coral, a run of clean white sand, separates the southern end of Palancar from the Colombia reefs, and the bricks lie in the break. That is why the same dive is sold as Palancar Bricks and as Columbia Bricks, and why divers file it under one reef or the other. In Spanish it is Palancar Ladrillos, the name the park uses for the fourth of Palancar's reefs1, and the one to say to a Spanish-speaking guide.

The dive is a terrain dive. Coral and sponges carry it, and the fish life is usually thinner than on the island's inshore reefs. The sand does much of the work: it lights the bottoms of the towers, and the animals on this dive are mostly out on it, southern stingrays with a bar jack above them and garden eels in the flats.

One returning visitor describes it as the whole menu of Cozumel's deep dives in a single drift, with towers, passages and a stretch of true wall, and enough light at about twenty-four metres to photograph in.

No one has matched the bricks to a ship. The version told on most boats is a barge that capsized in the 1950s and lost a brick cargo.

One diver who lives on the island and has photographed the site describes something older. He counts three anchors, one of them lifted in 1967 and now standing in the shallows at Chankanaab, and coins salvaged long ago that put the ship after 1870. He adds a boiler that Hurricane Wilma uncovered in 2005 and the sand has since buried again, and a further anchor about a hundred metres towards the wall with only its ring showing. Two other accounts go around among divers, an eighteenth-century Spanish ship carrying brick for a road and brick dumped as ballast.

Divers still lay pieces out on the sand to spell words for a camera before putting them back.

The park closes this section for rest in August and September, together with Palancar Caves and the three Colombia reefs2. The same window has held in every published year since 20203, which suits planning and is no promise. In the published rotation Gardens and Horseshoe rest in April and May, so Palancar is never shut all at once. Blocks are announced as they start, so ask your dive shop which reefs are resting for your dates.

The bricks are on the sand at the start of the route, and whether the group passes over them is settled by the mooring and the current on the day. Say you want to see them before you get in the water.

Look and put it back. Taking anything out of the park is prohibited, and gloves and knives stay out of the water, which matters more on a site whose name invites people to pick something up.

The dive turns on the wall. Held inside the pinnacle field, with sand under the group at twenty-four metres, it is an ordinary Cozumel drift. Out over the outer edge with nothing below, it is a different dive on the same booking, so agree in the briefing which one you are doing, and leave the narrow passage near the start to the guide, who may decline it.