Lighthouse

The entry sits in the middle of town, three minutes' walk from the dive centre door, and the site is a favourite for training, refresh dives and buoyancy checks. You start across the red gravel washed down from the wadi, which deepens into a sea grass meadow that is a likely place to spot turtles, before the coral begins. Conditions are described as ideal for courses from beginner through to deep, so what you agree on the beach matters more here than the entry does.

Off the beach the bottom is built of giant pinnacles covered in soft and hard corals with sand between them. Schools of barracuda are often the first thing you meet; napoleon wrasse, big groupers, morays, octopus, scorpionfish and crocodilefish work the coral, and turtles and eagle rays are seen along the reef regularly. Nudibranchs and worms repay a slow look along the coral.

On the sand, statues have been added in recent years to create an underwater museum of sorts, the most impressive of them a life-sized elephant assembled from old pieces of metal junk. It sits at 18 metres and is the cue to turn north onto the coral reef rather than to keep following the slope. Just offshore of the same entry hang the freediving training lines, weighted to 20, 35 and 40 metres — this is where most of Dahab's freedivers come to work on their skills, alongside the scuba traffic.