Pecio del Cairo

Cairo begins on the Llosa anchorage in 6-10 m of water and runs as a single multilevel. AOW divers descend the Llosa face to roughly 25 m, then take a 120 bearing across flat sand at the seabed. The transit is short, a few minutes of compass work, before the wreck appears as a low dark spread of rib frames on the bottom at 32-34 m. There is no hull silhouette to swim past — the boat has broken down to its cuadernas and the negative space between them. Spiny lobsters fill the gaps under the frames, anthias hover in small schools above the highest part of the wreckage, and the rest is sand. The structure is small enough to circle inside one bottom-time window, around fifteen minutes on air or a little longer on EAN32. The ascent reverses the approach: navigate back to the Llosa anchorage along the sand line, then climb the shelf face into the cracks and channels at 10-25 m and use the shallow top at 3-7 m as the safety-stop zone. Total dive time runs 35-45 minutes as one tank.

Cairo is the second wreck in Palamós. Boreas is the headline tugboat with five penetrable rooms and the WWII backstory; Cairo is the quiet alternative for divers who have already logged Boreas and want something different from the same port. The character is opposite. No intact hull, no rooms, no dramatic descent onto a recognisable vessel. What you get instead is a low debris field of rib frames on sand, with lobsters working the crevices and the route in built around a compass bearing rather than a mooring drop directly above the structure. Centres do not push it as a destination of its own; there is no separate Cairo booking line and no community trip-report tradition around the site. That is part of why it works as an AOW deep extension. You earn it by navigating to it, you spend a short focused window on the structure, and the rest of the dive is the Llosa shelf above.

Cairo asks for a tighter plan than the Llosa shelf alone. Nitrox is worth taking when the centre offers it: at 32-34 m, EAN32 buys roughly 5-8 more minutes of bottom time and a lower nitrogen dose. Plan thermal protection for 14-19 °C at depth, not the surface, because the wreck sits below the May-October thermocline at 15-20 m. The compass bearing is not optional. The wreck is not visible from the Llosa mooring, and a 300 reciprocal brings you back to the shelf. Hover above the rib frames; poor buoyancy on sand silts the wreck for everyone behind you. Three centres run the extension explicitly: Gidive, H2O Diving Center, and Medusadive. They price it as part of the standard Llosa boat dive rather than a separate Cairo trip.