Primavera

You drop in from the boat over wreckage lying between 16 and 24 m, in a protected pocket of the archipelago that stays workable when the exposed sites are not. Nothing about the Primavera stands proud: the steamer is severely broken up, so the dive reads as a field of plating and framing rather than a hull you can swim along. Corals carpet most of the metal, and the shallow end leaves plenty of bottom time to work through it.

Move across the debris and the residents show themselves in the shadows under the plates — forkbeards, red mullets, scorpionfish, wrasse and lobsters tucked into the gaps, with schools of seabream drifting over the top. Dories and pagrus turn up too, and ocean sunfish are an occasional visitor rather than something to plan a dive around. Visibility swings widely: around 10 m on an ordinary day, 20–30 m at its best between July and October.

Where collapsed plating has left submerged passages, treat them as overhead: the sensible line is around them rather than through them unless you are trained and lit for it. There is little reason to go looking for a way in, because the growth and the fish are spread across the outside of the debris field. The ascent is straightforward off the shallow end of the wreckage at around 16 m.