Palancar Gardens

The drop happens 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 in front of you as a field of coral towers and spires with wide white sand channels running between them, its top at six to ten metres. You work out through one of the channels towards the seaward edge, and most guides settle the group somewhere between twelve and twenty-one metres and keep it there.

Then the part that surprises people. You have to fin. This is a drift island and most of this dive is not a drift: inside the canyons and among the pinnacles there is little or no current on a normal day, so you swim the site instead of flying it. The exceptions are the headlands. Every time the reef pushes out into a point the water accelerates around it and carries you into the next cove, which is why the points carry the densest coral on the section. Then you climb back onto the top of the reef for the last stretch and the familiar Cozumel drift comes back.

The wall is a decision. 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 anything a recreational diver should plan for. 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 finally turn up in numbers.

Palancar is one reef, not four dive sites. About five kilometres of it runs down the southwest corner of the island, and it is sold as four separately bookable dives under the Spanish names the park authority set. The 1996 decree that created the protected area lists three of them, Jardines, La Herradura and Cuevones1. The 1998 management programme still in force lists four, and the fourth is Ladrillos2. The official inventory of this reef grew between those two documents. Cuevones is the older official name for the section every shop now sells as Cuevas. Gardens is the northern end, where the boats come in from, and Bricks is the far south, with Caves and Horseshoe between them.

The second thing worth knowing before you compare shops is that this section has no divable maximum. The platform is shallow, the wall lip sits at about eighteen metres, and the outer wall falls past recreational limits into the channel. The only ceiling on the dive is the park's, which caps sport diving at forty-five metres2. So when one shop publishes five to forty metres and another publishes ten to twenty-five, neither is wrong and neither is describing the reef. They are publishing the profile they intend to run, which is a dive plan and not a measurement.

That geometry is what makes Gardens the section a new diver can be sold honestly. The platform and the wall are two dives in the same place and the guide picks between them, so a diver can have the shallow one and still have dived Palancar. Caves is mostly swim-through and runs along the drop, with no shallow version of itself to fall back on. Here the structure is open, nothing closes over your head, and the current is the mildest of the four.

The trade is marine life. Gardens is a terrain dive, and the fish are thinner here than at Paso del Cedral up the coast. Purple sea fans and orange sponges cover the towers, hawksbills work the reef top, southern stingrays sit in the turtle grass where the dive begins and ends, and queen angelfish, blue chromis and spiny lobsters hold the crevices. The structure and the light are what you come for.

Jacques Cousteau is said to have dived Palancar in the early 1960s and called it paradise, and the visit is credited with starting Cozumel's dive industry. No evidence for it has surfaced. The dates published for the same claimed visit span seventeen years, from 1945 to 1962, no record or copy of the documentary the story rests on has ever been found, and the Cousteau Society has stated that no such film existed3. The honest position is not that he never came. It is that nothing has ever been produced to show that he did.

A film was shot here, and it is the better story. 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 year3. Cozumel has a reef named after Cardona.

The reef names themselves come out of the years before GPS. Captains on this coast found their dive sites by lining them up against individual trees on the shore, and the trees had names of their own. A drop point at the middle of Gardens is still called Caracolillo, after the tree that marked it from the water. Where the word Palancar itself came from is unsettled.

Ask for Palancar Gardens when you arrange the diving, not when you are standing on the boat. It is far south on the reef line, the run is long, and at least one shop runs it only for a group of six or more, so it is one of the sites that quietly drops off a day's plan. Say why you want it. Then expect the plan to be settled at the mooring line anyway, because the boat dives the profile its least experienced diver can dive.

There is one window to avoid outright. The park rests three of its reef complexes at a time, roughly two months each, and Jardines is rested together with Herradura in what has recently been a spring block around April and May. No government page publishes the year's calendar. Each cycle is announced as it begins and the dive shops and the local press pass it on, so check which sections are open for your dates before you commit a trip to this one.

Agree the profile in the briefing. Open Water covers the platform-and-lip dive shops plan here, and a new diver who follows the group over the lip is past an eighteen-metre training limit in seconds. At twelve to twenty-one metres over sand the gas runs out long before the no-decompression time does, which is why times run anywhere from thirty-five minutes to a little over an hour and why nitrox buys nothing you will use.

Bring a camera for the light. Sunlight reaches working depth here over white sand with nothing overhead, so wide angle works in the channels at twelve metres and macro works in the crevices, and nothing on this section needs a torch except a hole you want to look into.