Pecio Arona

A fixed line drops straight into blue water, and the wreck doesn't appear until you're most of the way down. There's no reef nearby, no shallow reference to hold onto: just the mooring line and, eventually, a large hull emerging out of the sand at 36 metres. Most divers head first to the bow, checking the curve of the starboard hull for anything sheltering in its shadow, then rise along the deck centreline to under 30 metres for a pseudo-penetration into the forward holds. Torch light picks out black coral on the walls, and a school of sea bream often greets divers on the way back out. From there the route runs aft past the enormous keel and a second pseudo-penetration near the three deck cranes, where a resident group of white damselfish shelters from the barracuda patrolling above. The dive typically finishes by pushing off the wreck into open blue water before the ascent, a deliberate move that saves the site's other signature sight for last: hundreds of barracuda circling in mid-water.

This wreck became Gran Canaria's default wreck dive by circumstance. When the island's older wreck cluster off Puerto de la Luz lost diver access in 2013 to quay construction, the Arona, a large, intact vessel at an accessible depth close to the capital's marina, filled the gap. It remains the site more centers run trips to than any other wreck on the east coast, and the only one that regularly combines interior pseudo-penetrations with open-water pelagic sightings. The structure keeps changing, too. Sections of deck and superstructure have collapsed in recent winter storms, so no two years look quite the same underwater. Two non-native reef fish species, first recorded here in 2014, arrived clinging to offshore oil-platform structures, a small but genuine sign of how far this artificial reef's reach extends beyond the hull itself.

She was launched in 1967 at a shipyard in El Ferrol as the Carmen M. de Pinillos, built to run the Canary Islands' first refrigerated banana line to mainland Spain. Sold in 1974 and renamed Arona, she was ten years into that career when fire broke out in her engine room overnight, roughly 100 nautical miles south of Gran Canaria, while under way from Abidjan to load frozen fish for Nigeria. The crew of 24 abandoned ship and were rescued; two vessels took the burning hulk under tow toward Las Palmas, but the fire reignited, and on 23 April 1978 she sank off Punta Jinamar. The ship's bell, still bearing her original name, survives today in a private collection.

A permanent mooring buoy and descent line have been fitted to one of the wreck's crane gantries since 2021, which has simplified entry and exit considerably. Average dive time on the standard route runs about 39 minutes. Carry a line cutter or knife: recreational fishing line is common in the area, and a signalling buoy should go up before any emergency ascent away from the mooring line. The wreck's condition is actively changing after recent storm damage, so dive with an operator who can speak to its current state rather than relying on an older route description. Divers with 80 or more bar left in a 12-litre cylinder sometimes add a second, shallower dive at a nearby cavern on the same boat trip.