Palancar Caves

From the sandbank inside the wall a canyon runs down through the coral to the seaward edge, where the reef ends in a lip at about twenty-four metres and the wall falls away past anything a recreational diver plans for. The dive is spent along that lip, among the buttresses and pinnacles that stand above it.

They stand close enough together that the gaps between them roof over into tunnels, and the guide threads the group through one after another. The passages are wide. Daylight falls into them from above and lands on the sand at the far end, gorgonians and sea fans hang from the ceilings, and each passage has an open way round the outside for anyone who prefers it.

Most of the swimming happens in almost still water. The current barely moves inside the canyons, picks up at each point of the reef, and returns to ordinary Cozumel drift only once you are up on the reef top, so this is a dive you fin through more than you ride. It usually finishes as a slow multi-level climb onto that top, at eight to ten metres, with the safety stop above it.

The reef here is built of tall coral buttresses and pinnacles, and the dive happens inside that structure. It is a honeycomb of swim-throughs, some of them very large, with spires rising from the depths, and Caves has more of them than the other Palancar sections. The picture people come away with is a wide-angle frame shot up from inside a passage toward the light.

The park's own name for this section is Cuevones, the augmentative of cueva, which reads as big caves. The 1996 decree that created the national park lists Palancar as Jardines, La Herradura and Cuevones1, and the 1998 management programme still in force still names Cuevones among the four sections2. Later notices and the island's operators say Cuevas, and the English name that followed dropped the big. Some divers still write Palancar Big Caves.

Despite the name, these are tunnels and open swim-throughs formed where coral has grown over a limestone base, with daylight reaching into them and the exit in view. Among Cozumel's overheads they sit at the easy end of the island, and the tighter, darker ones are in the C-53 wreck and the Devil's Throat at Punta Sur.

The reef carries fewer fish than most of Cozumel. Giant barrel sponges stand out along the wall, hamlets and redspotted hawkfish work the finger and lettuce coral near the top of the reef, and squirrelfish and bigeyes shelter under the sheet-coral overhangs by day. Blackcap basslets hang upside down against the roofs of the passages.

Palancar Caves and Bricks are rested in August and September under the park's reef rotation. The calendar is announced cycle by cycle, so ask your dive shop which reefs are resting for your dates. Two of Palancar's four sections stay open at any time of year. An authorised guide is required on every dive in the park and checks your buoyancy before the first one.

Inside a passage the ceiling is coral and closer than it looks, and fine sediment waits in the lower crevices for the next hard kick. Frog kick, flat trim and a metre and a half of clear water between you and the coral keep the passage clean for the divers behind you. Hover in the tunnels; the coral overhead is as fragile as the coral under you.