La Herradura

Diving is run from the village, where Buceo Aqualia, Delta Buceo and Buceo España are based, and the boats work out of Marina del Este. The bay does the shallow work: the course area beside the harbour holds 2 to 12 m of rock, and Piedra del Hombre, east of the bay, is reached from a boat, from the beach, or by jumping from the cliff, an entry that turns awkward when wind or tide change, because the climb out may become impossible. The Cerro Gordo sites west of the bay are boat work inside a protected area that keeps motor craft 200 m off its beaches and 50 m off the rest of the coast, with anchoring confined to marked zones between sunrise and sunset.

The rock is the attraction. Roqueo de los 14 sits in the middle of a rocky area about 14 m down, full of cracks, holes and open sand, and Piedras Altas is a jumble of fallen vertical rocks with tunnels and overhangs under the west side of the Punta de la Mona cliff. Shaded walls carry orange Astroides calycularis, which grows where the sunlight does not reach: it lines the wall at Inmersión de la Virgen, sits on the rock at Piedra del Hombre, and covers the Cerro Gordo walls at Cueva de las Palomas and Pared Amarilla. Cueva de las Palomas is a wall dive in spite of its name, and Pared Amarilla east of it reaches about 20 m, the deepest ground in the protected area.

The bay suits divers in training and divers after short, shallow days, since every Cerro Gordo dive can be made on an Open Water certificate, and the shops brief a no-touch rule for the protected ground - no fins against the rock, no hand down to steady a camera. The deep rock is the other half of the coast: La Calita drops to a plain at 32 m and Punta de la Mona runs 25 to 48 m, both advanced dives on a coast whose ordinary sites stop well short of that. Divers who came for big fish on protected seamounts will do better at Cabo de Palos, and wreck divers should look there too.