Eilat

Diving here runs on car keys rather than boat schedules. The centres sit along the southern shore road, you kit up beside the vehicle or on the sand and walk in, and inside the nature reserve fixed bridges carry divers over the reef table so nobody wades across living coral. That makes the day elastic: several dives fit easily, the surface interval is a coffee up the road, and a night dive uses the same entry you used at midday. Summer is comfortable in the water; it is the walk back to the car in July that hurts.

Underwater it is a fringing reef, a shallow table with a drop at its edge and a slope running out to sand, so dives are an out-and-back along the contour rather than a drift. The reef face carries the depth, and you can hold 25 m on the slope or spend the whole dive at 10, with navigation as simple as keeping the coral on one shoulder. The scuttled missile boat off the marina, normally reached by boat, is the one piece of hard structure in a place otherwise made entirely of reef.

The reef is also a research subject. Corals in the Gulf of Aqaba hold up to summer heat that has bleached reefs elsewhere, and the leading explanation, that the population was filtered by a thermal bottleneck as it recolonised the gulf, remains a hypothesis rather than settled fact; an inter-university marine science institute sits on the shore beside the reserve, and that presence is part of the place. Local pressure is a separate question from heat, since nutrients, port traffic and coastal development all shape what you see. What the diving will not give you is current, open-water drop-offs or big animals.