Reggio Messina

The mooring line drops straight to the stern at 23m, the shallowest point and the natural starting position. The hull plates are immediately apparent, the entire structure canted to port, with the mast rising above and schools of sargos orbiting in loose formations. Moving forward along the hull, the depth increases gradually. This is not a sudden plunge but a long traverse as you follow the length of the vessel. At mid-deck around 27m, the structure turns complex. Storm damage has bent and separated sections, and the most rewarding terrain is at the breaks — jagged openings where the interior becomes accessible.

The main penetration entry is a crack in the upper deck, now lying nearly horizontal on the sand. Inside, a corridor runs forward in dim light; a torch is necessary and good buoyancy control is not optional. The silt is deep and undisturbed in the less-trafficked rooms. Exit is through a door hatch. At the separated bow around 35m, the enclosed volume creates sheltered habitat, and groupers have claimed the darker rooms as their own.

The ascent back to the stern, or directly up the mooring line, is straightforward. A safety stop against the rocky coastal slope at 5m offers a productive final few minutes: octopuses, moray eels, and prawns in the rock crevices while the nitrogen clears.

On a coast of natural reef, wall, and cavern dives, the Reggio is the only accessible wreck at recreational advanced depth. El Marmoler, the other wreck on this stretch, sits at 42m, which puts it beyond practical reach for most recreational visitors. The Reggio at 23-35m is within range for any AOW diver ready to push into the deeper end of the recreational envelope.

The scale matters. Mediterranean dive sites are rarely large. A 122m vessel feels enormous against the rocky features and reef walls that define everything else on this coast. You can spend 50 minutes here and not cover it — a genuinely unusual feeling in Med recreational diving.

The ship's backstory adds something most wrecks lack. Deck rails are still visible beneath the encrusting growth — physical evidence of its original purpose hauling railway carriages across the Strait of Messina. After more than 30 years of colonisation in protected park waters, those rails are overgrown with sponges and hydroids, and large groupers have moved into the rooms the sea created when storms pulled the structure apart.

The Reggio Messina was an Italian railway ferry, one of the vessels that carried train carriages across the Strait of Messina between Sicily and the Italian mainland. After decommissioning it sat semi-submerged and abandoned in Barcelona harbour for several years, familiar to those who watched it slowly deteriorate.

In 1991 the vessel was towed to the Montgri coast and deliberately scuttled to create an artificial reef. What the planners could not control was how the ship would behave under decades of winter tramontana storms. The hull settled canted to port on the sand. The tramontana did the rest. By the mid-2020s, the wreck lay in roughly twenty fragments, the bow separated entirely from the main structure. The fragmentation was not the plan. It has made the site more complex and, for divers, more interesting.

Decide before the dive whether to focus on the stern section or push to the separated bow at 35m. The site is too large to cover both on a single dive. The mooring buoy descends to the stern, so the stern is always the starting point; the question is whether your gas and bottom time allow the deeper push to the bow.

Nitrox matters here. EANx32 meaningfully extends bottom time at 23-35m and reduces decompression risk. Most L'Estartit and L'Escala operators offer it, and bringing a torch is equally important regardless of the interior penetration plan. Visibility runs 5-15m in open water; inside the wreck you need artificial light. The site is a short boat ride from port, around five minutes from L'Estartit, which means less transit time than most Medes island trips.