Los Cuevones — Cave of the Sleeping Sharks

The caves sit east of the island, about twenty-seven minutes out by boat, with the floor at roughly eighteen metres. This is a piece of diving history as much as a dive site: it is where Caribbean reef sharks were found resting on the bottom, and the detail that made them famous is that they were not actually asleep - the sharks' eyes would follow divers around the cave. It was the first active shark species in which such behaviour was reported.

The discovery belongs to a lobster fisherman, Carlos García, nicknamed Válvula, who found the sharks first. Ramón Bravo went out in the 1970s to verify what the fisherman had described, and shared the discovery with Dr Eugenie Clark, who investigated the sleeping sharks inside the caves off the Yucatán Peninsula. Sightings are rare now; the sharks divers meet in the cave these days are nurse sharks, over lion fish, angelfish, barracuda and snapper on the surrounding reef.