Palancar Gardens

The drop is inshore of the reef, over sand and turtle grass at about ten metres, and the first thing you do is swim. The reef stands up ahead as a field of coral towers and spires, its top at six to ten metres, with wide white sand channels running between them. You work out through one of the channels towards the seaward edge, and operators plan the dive around twelve to twenty-one metres.

Then the part that surprises people. This is a drift island and most of this dive is not a drift. Inside the canyons and among the pinnacles there is usually little or no current, so you swim the site and use the push around each headland to carry you into the next cove. The points hold the densest coral on the section. Back on top of the reef for the last stretch, the familiar Cozumel drift returns.

At the seaward edge the ground stops at around eighteen metres and goes vertical, cut with overhangs, tunnels and swim-throughs, and below that it keeps going past recreational limits. You can go and look over the lip. You do not have to, and the dive works either way.

The finish is shallow, over the coral heads at around nine metres, and it is where the fish turn up in numbers.

Palancar is one reef about five kilometres long, booked as four separate dives under Spanish names the park authority set. The 1996 decree that created the protected area lists three, Jardines, La Herradura and Cuevones1. The 1998 management programme lists four, and the fourth is Ladrillos2. Cuevones is the official name of the section shops now sell as Cuevas, and Ladrillos is Bricks. Gardens is described as the northern end of the system, the first section for boats arriving from the north.

Gardens is a terrain dive. Towering spires and cliffs covered in gorgonians and sponges are what the dive offers, and the fish life is modest next to Paso del Cedral up the coast. Purple sea fans and orange sponges cover the towers, hawksbills are reported over the reef top, southern stingrays sit in the turtle grass, and queen angelfish, blue chromis and spiny lobsters hold the crevices. White sand under the structure bounces the light back up, so colour holds at twelve metres.

The platform and the wall are two dives in the same place, and that is the draw: a diver can have the shallow one and still say they dived Palancar, while a diver who wants the edge can have that.

A story repeated on many Palancar pages credits Jacques Cousteau with filming a documentary here and starting Cozumel's dive industry. No record of it has surfaced. The dates published for the supposed visit run from 1945 to 1962, and the Cousteau Society has said that no such film existed3. That a visit happened is not ruled out; a record of it has yet to turn up.

A film was shot here. The Mexican director René Cardona took a crew to Cozumel in 1956 to make Un Mundo Nuevo, which premiered in Mexico City in August 1957 and reached American cinemas the following year. The island's historian credits it with putting Cozumel on the map3, and Cozumel has a reef named for Cardona.

Before GPS, dive crews on this coast are said to have located reefs against trees on the shoreline. Caracolillo, a drop point near the middle of Gardens, carries a name from that practice.

The park rests three of its reef complexes at a time, and the shops and local press report Palancar Jardines resting together with Herradura in April and May. Each cycle is announced as it begins, so the calendar moves; ask your dive shop which reefs are resting for your dates.

Boats work the shallows inshore of the reef, the same water the dive starts and finishes in, so send a marker buoy up before you surface and ascend with the group.