Pungtud Wall

There is no buoy to tie to. The boatman lines up a fishing hut standing on pillars in the water with Panglao's south point, and where those two meet is where you get in.

You are on the wall in seconds, because the top of it is three to five metres down. Hard and soft coral, anemones, small fish over all of it. The route puts the wall on your right shoulder heading northwest, and the face falls away below you past twenty-five metres into a sandy slope that carries on down. Almost nobody follows it. The dive is spent between seven and fifteen metres, working along the coral and looking into the small caves and overhangs cut into the face, which is what the torch is for.

Then the turn, and the shops write about this part more than they write about the wall. The route comes back over the shallow sand pads at about four metres, and they are the reason to keep gas in the tank: frogfish, macro, coral heads with fish over them, at the depth where you have all the time in the world.

The return leg is the only thing here that asks anything of you. A slight current can set against you at the end, and the standing instruction is to come back shallow, heading south, if it starts to cost you.

Every other named wall on Panglao makes you go deep for the good part. The gorgonians at Doljo sit between eighteen and thirty metres on a face with nothing underneath it; Cervera is a seamount ten kilometres out that gets cancelled when the current is up. Here the wall top is at three metres, the band the whole dive is built around is seven to fifteen, and a newly certified diver sees the entire site without approaching a limit.

The ending is the other thing. Most dives put the shallow finish somewhere to burn off the safety stop. Two centres single out these sand pads as a feature in their own right, and the macro backs them up: the frogfish are on the shallow ground, not on the face.

The signal worth most, though, comes from outside the shops. Two experienced divers, five years apart, name Puntod unprompted as one of the few local Panglao sites they rate, and one of them says so in the same breath as dismissing a run of the reefs off the Alona strip. On a site whose description otherwise comes entirely from the people selling it, that counts for a lot.

The island this site is named after spent about seventeen months closed. In September 2024 at least thirteen people's names were found carved into two large table corals at a snorkelling and scuba site off Puntod Island1, the mayor shut the site by executive order2, and the closure widened to all tourism on the island1. It reopened in February 2026, under written marine tourism guidelines for the Panglao Island Protected Seascape3.

Those rules change your day, so go through them with your operator when you book. Every tourist boat docks at Puntod Island as the single entry and exit point, and visitors register, pay an entrance fee and attend a compulsory environmental briefing before anyone gets in the water4. Snorkelling and diving are capped at two hours of interaction time, accredited guides go with you, and the island runs from six in the morning to six in the evening4. Oxybenzone and octinoxate sunscreens are banned and boats are inspected before entry, so buy the reef-safe bottle at home. No fee schedule has been published anywhere, which makes the cost a question for your operator rather than something to budget from a page. So is the boundary: the wall the shops dive is fixed about 1.9 km north of the island, and nobody has published whether the island's rules reach it.

Set your floor at twenty-five metres and you have planned this dive correctly. The face keeps going below that into sand and then to around forty-five metres of rock, and none of it is what the site is for. The centres that dive it every week say so themselves.

Bring a torch, and here that is worth the space in the bag: the caves and overhangs along the face at working depth are dark inside and looked into rather than entered. They are cavelets, not an overhead environment, and nobody takes divers through them.

Keep something in reserve for the way back. The outward leg is the easy half, and the return is where a current can turn up.