Sardina del Norte

Los Jardines de Sardina starts as a navigation exercise: about seven minutes at 5 metres, then a controlled descent without a visual reference. What follows is a sandbank where yellow gorgonians are the visual centrepiece and a garden-eel colony seems to have no end, with rays and small sharks lying flat on the sand and morays and shrimp on the way back. The route lasts about an hour, and when the current is running the guide turns it into a circuit with the current behind you.

The other seven routes differ more in character than in depth. La Cuevita, at 10 m, is a slow macro route among small corals and little animals, and Paso del Sargo works with backlight through arches where juvenile fish take refuge. Los Cañones threads lava arches and canyon-like folds, and El Faro Hundido follows the cliff.

Las Anclas is the one with a story: it crosses a maerl bed to old traps and anchors that have grown over into an artificial reef of sponges and corals, with a fangtooth moray as its flagship. Rocas Pareidolias is named for rock shapes that read as a petrified turtle, a whale's tail and King Solomon's table, and is butterfly ray and trumpetfish ground. The night dive comes last, when angel sharks and butterfly rays hunt and slipper lobsters sit out in the open.

On the six routes from the second mole, the entry is a giant stride from the dock at low tide, or the stairs down into the water at high tide.

Eight differently shaped dives share one bay, so the route you pick decides the day: a sandbank garden, lava arches, a maerl bed laid over old fishing gear, rock shapes, a backlit passage, a night dive. The bay stays diveable almost all year, including when other parts of the island cannot be dived, and a single centre can send the same divers out on consecutive days without repeating a dive. Angel sharks, critically endangered, are most active on the night dive, and seahorses have been seen sitting around the rocks. Afterwards you surface beside a fishing village with a promenade, bars and restaurants.

Sardina's port ranked as a first-rank commercial harbour, a puerto de Primera Mar, and was the island's main export port until the port of Las Palmas was built. A former warehouse there is now the Aula del Mar maritime museum. On the headland at Punta de Sardina a monument put up by Gáldar's town council states that Columbus left La Pinta on Gran Canaria for rudder repairs on 11 August 1492 while he sailed on to La Gomera. The monument calls this the majority view of historians, and local press frames it as a hypothesis against a rival claim for Maspalomas.

Non-professional rod fishing is permitted near the bay, and on Los Jardines de Sardina a line cutter or knife is mandatory. Enter and exit at the designated point, and send up a signalling buoy on any emergency ascent, because boats and motors work around the entry. Current is the variable between routes: nil to low on El Faro Hundido and La Cuevita, medium on four others, decisive enough at Los Jardines to change the route. Paso del Sargo and the night dive are graded Advanced by Buceo Norte.