Palancar Horseshoe

The gorgonians tell you where the current is. Out on the exposed points of this section they stand into the water and visibly shiver, and that is where the standard route starts, around twenty-four metres, deep first while you have the gas for it. The wall at that depth carries blackcap basslets hanging upside down under the ledges, orange rope sponges going off in every direction, and the odd longsnout butterflyfish swimming the same way up as the basslets.

What you are diving is not one face. Coral heads, spires and buttresses stand in tight groups from around thirty metres to within six of the surface, with gullies and canyons between them and sand slopes running away below. You go over one formation and drop five or six metres to the next instead of following a single edge, and the water changes with the terrain: near enough still inside the coves, then a shove as you come round each point into the following one.

Then the reef parts. The overhangs run out and the coral opens into a wide u-shaped patch of sand, which is the shape the section is named for and the quietest ground on the dive. Razorfish live in it. Guides who know the site slow down here and work the sea grass around its edges, which is where nudibranchs and, now and then, a seahorse turn up.

Back into the coral, a long V-shaped passage is usually packed with small silver fish holding out of the sunlight, and it opens into a maze of canyons that climbs back towards daylight. The dive ends there, six to nine metres over the rim, with the safety stop above it and the shallow half of the site all around you.

The name is a shape you can point at. The reef turns in on itself here and closes into a bowl, an amphitheatre wide enough that its outline reads from the surface on a flat day, with the sand patch at the middle of the dive for a floor. The shape is what the section is named for, and you can read it off the boat before anyone gets in the water.

It sits second from the north on Palancar, between Gardens and Caves. That much holds. Where one section ends and the next begins does not, and nobody on the island has drawn a line that the rest accept. Divers are briefed for one name at the start of a dive and given a different one at the end, then write whichever they remember in the logbook. The four names are drop points on a single continuous reef, so the one you get is set by the mooring the captain takes and by how far the current carries you before you come up.

There is a block of concrete on the sand here with a bronze plaque bolted to one side, and the plaque shows two hardhat divers standing either side of a figure of Christ. Most of the time it is buried. Storms and current uncover it, divers find it, and the guide either knows what it is or has never heard of it.

It is a plinth. In 1984 Ramón Bravo, the underwater cinematographer from Isla Mujeres, put the idea of a submerged statue of Christ for Palancar to the governor of Quintana Roo, who commissioned it from the sculptor Enrique Miralda Bulnes as a gift to Cozumel1. The finished piece came over from Mexico City by truck with one arm broken off in transit, and it was reattached in a repair shop on the island. The base was cast in a mould assembled on the deck of a wooden-hulled boat at Puerto de Abrigo, lowered onto the seabed at this section, and the statue was lowered onto it and secured.

When it moved, and why, is not established, though Hurricane Gilbert, which struck Cozumel in September 1988, is commonly given as the reason. What is certain is where the statue ended up: in the water in front of Chankanaab Park, further north up the same coast, where divers and snorkellers visit it today. The base was not brought with it. Divers who have seen it uncovered report a sergeant major guarding an egg patch on the concrete and a blenny living on the plaque.

The Spanish name carries the same history. Mexico declared the national park in 1996, and the decree that did it writes this section as La Herradura2; the management programme still in force writes it the same way. That is the name the park uses in its closure notices and the name the Mexican press prints, so anyone following a Spanish trail finds Palancar Herradura where an English one says Horseshoe.

April and May are the months this section is shut. Reefs here are rested three at a time so coral can recover, and this one goes into the rest window paired with Gardens and Dalila; in 2026 that ran from 1 April to 31 May3. The rotation is announced cycle by cycle and never set out a year ahead, so a spring trip built around this section starts with a question to the dive shop about your own dates.

Two other questions are worth putting in the same conversation. The first is which depth plan the boat runs, because the published figure for this one section varies by about ten metres between shops and that gap is the difference between a dive inside an Advanced card and one that is not. The second is when it is going: this is a first dive of the morning on an island that runs its deep sites on the first tank, so it is not something to ask for after lunch.

Weather changes which section you want. Heavy overnight rain reaches this end of the reef before the southern end, and divers on longer trips describe switching to Bricks and Caves on those mornings and finding clearer water there.

The rest is the park's. Every dive here runs under an authorised guide, who is required to check your buoyancy before you get in and to end the dive of anyone who cannot hold position4. Neither gloves nor a knife may go in the water anywhere in this park, which takes away the option of holding on to something, and holding on was never permitted anyway. If you want to see the plinth, say so on the boat and not underwater. It is a small object on a big reef and the sand is usually over it.