Palancar Bricks

Red brick lies scattered on white sand at the start of the dive, with an anchor in among it. Whether your group swims over the pile is settled on the morning. They lie on the flats at the point where the reef breaks, and the guides know the spot. Garden eels stand out of the same sand on the channel side, dropping back into their holes as the group comes past.

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, which starts at around fourteen metres and runs down to sand at twenty-seven. The coral comes as separate towers, not as one face, tall formations with sand slopes falling away between them into blue water, so you cross the gaps instead of tracking an edge.

Early on there is a passage through the pinnacles, narrow and close to vertical. Not every guide takes a group into it, and there is no need to go. Everything beyond it is also reachable around the outside. Past that the site turns and starts behaving like a wall, cut with recesses and hung with more towers, and most boats bottom out at about twenty-four metres along it. The light is still clean down there and the sand throws it back up under the coral. Two or three more passages come up towards the end of the dive 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 underneath.

Ask for this dive by the other name and you will still get it. The same ground is sold as Palancar Bricks and as Columbia Bricks, because it sits on the seam where one reef stops and the next starts. There is a break in the coral there, a run of clean sand between the last of Palancar and the first of the Colombia reefs, and the bricks lie in the break. In Spanish it is Palancar Ladrillos, which is the name the park itself uses1 and the one to say to a Spanish-speaking guide.

The park files it south as well as naming it. Reefs are closed here in blocks to let the coral recover, and Ladrillos is closed with the three Colombia reefs rather than with the rest of Palancar2. Divers get to the same place from the water. More than one regular writes this dive into a logbook under Colombia and then lists four Palancar dives with no Bricks among them.

Not everyone gives it a name at all. Some shops here sell Palancar as one dive with no sections, and one publishes a detailed model of the reef, point by point from north to south, with no Bricks anywhere in it. One of the island's long-serving guides holds that the bricks mark a spot on the sand and not a reef of its own. What nobody disputes is the ground. There is a brick field down there with anchors in it, and everyone who dives it surfaces talking about the same white sand and the same coral towers.

Divers who come back to Cozumel year after year are unusually consistent about the dive itself. They call it a favourite deep dive and describe it as the island's deep dives folded into one, with passages and pinnacles and a stretch of wall inside a single drift, the bottom at around twenty-four metres, and enough light left at that depth to photograph in.

Nobody has matched the bricks to a ship. The account you will hear on the boat is a barge that capsized in the 1950s and spilled a cargo of red brick onto the sand. No evidence has ever been produced for it.

A diver living on the island, who has photographed what is down there, gives an older version. Three anchors, he says, one of them lifted in 1967 and now standing in the shallows in front of Chankanaab. Coins salvaged many years ago that put the ship somewhere after 1870. A boiler that Hurricane Wilma uncovered in 2005 and the sand has since covered over again. A hundred metres or so towards the wall, another anchor lies almost completely buried with only its ring showing.

The two versions cannot both be right. A boiler means a steam vessel and coins after 1870 mean the nineteenth century, so neither belongs to a barge from the 1950s, and an anchor recovered in 1967 sits badly with a 1950s wreck as well. Two more accounts circulate among divers, one making it an eighteenth-century Spanish ship carrying brick for a road, the other making the brick ballast dumped off a ship and not a cargo it lost.

What survives all four versions is the brick itself. Divers still lift pieces off the sand and lay them out to spell words for a camera before putting them back, which is the one part of this site's story that is not in dispute.

The rest window here falls in late summer. Reefs in this park are closed in blocks so the coral can recover, and this section closes in August and September with the three Colombia reefs and with Palancar Caves2. Every published year since 2020 has followed that pattern3, which is worth planning around and is not a promise. Gardens and Horseshoe are rested in spring instead, so the reef is never shut all at once. No government page carries the year's cycle, so ask your dive shop which reefs are resting for your dates.

Ask for the dive by name and expect a different name back. Ladrillos to a Spanish-speaking guide, Bricks or Columbia Bricks in English, and it is worth confirming on the boat that the site being dived is the one you booked.

The bricks are not on every route. They lie on the sand at the start of the dive, and whether the group passes over them is decided by the mooring and the current on the day, so say you want to see them before you get in the water rather than pointing at the sand afterwards.

Look and put it back. Taking anything out of this park is prohibited, and gloves and knives cannot go in the water anywhere inside it. Both matter more here than on most dives, because the name invites people to pick something up, and bricks have gone home in luggage over the years.

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