Menjangan & West Bali · Indonesia · Artificial reef
Garden of the Gods
Twenty-five carved statues and a split gate at 28 m
Area photo: Bernard DUPONT · CC BY-SA 4.0
The younger of Pemuteran's two underwater statue gardens, built from 2014: twenty-five carved figures and a split gate at 28 m, set beside a damaged coral reef and covering 2,500 square metres of sandy seabed that runs from 5 m to 30 m. The figures, not the reef, are what divers come down for.
Where it is and how deep
8.1430° S, 114.6550° EApproximate position — the dashed circle shows where the site lies; your operator's briefing has the mooring.
The dive
The statues stand at 28 m, so this is a deep dive by Pemuteran standards and a short one: you descend onto the installation, work through it, and come up. There is no wall or slope to follow, so navigation is a matter of moving between the figures themselves — a split gate and twenty-five carved statues — and keeping track of where the shallower ground lies.
The garden covers 2,500 square metres of sandy seabed running from 5 m to 30 m, which is more ground than one dive at the deep end gets you around, and it sits beside a coral reef that was already damaged when the statues arrived. It is the second of the bay's two statue gardens, placed about half a kilometre from the older Temple Garden, and roughly 70 bio-rock structures stand along the same shoreline, so the figures are one piece of a much larger set of installed structures. Bottom time is the limit here, not interest.
Background
Pemuteran's underwater statues grew out of the reef restoration work begun by Reef Seen, the dive operation started in the bay in 1992 after fishing with poison and explosives had wrecked the coral. In 2005, with AusAid funding, the project sank Buddha statues offshore as the Temple Garden; from 2014 it added the Garden of the Gods half a kilometre away, a split gate and twenty-five carved statues on 2,500 square metres of seabed. Separately, about 70 bio-rocks were installed along this shoreline from 2000 by the Karang Lestari Foundation and the Global Coral Reef Alliance.
Marine life and season
The sources we used don't single out particular species here.
| Jan | Feb | Mar | Apr | May | Jun | Jul | Aug | Sep | Oct | Nov | Dec |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Good | Good | Good | Prime | Prime | Prime | Prime | Prime | Prime | Prime | Good | Good |
Season follows Menjangan & West Bali: Divable all year thanks to the lee of Java; Apr–Nov is driest, and the wet season only affects surface conditions.
Know before you go
- The statues sit at 28 m, the deep end of the recreational range, so bottom time is short — agree a turn time before the descent rather than working it out among the figures.
Sources
- Gerokgak, Buleleng — Wikipedia
More dive sites in Menjangan & West Bali
Wall
Steep wall from 3 m to 45 m, running east into hard coral
Coral garden
Sponge-studded coral slope from 4 m to 25 m, usually currentless
Coral garden
Currentless coral slope from 3 m to 25 m, macro the whole way
Reef
Pemuteran's first protected reef, 20 m off the beach
Reef
An upper reef the size of half a football field, with three deep peninsulas
Reef
Clear water from 3 m to 40 m, 15 minutes off Pemuteran
Wall
Sea fans and frogfish on a wall, a 150-year-old wreck below
Sand slope
Coral blocks scattered over sand between 10 m and 20 m
Similar dives elsewhere
Village-laid cement blocks turned into a coral reef patrolled by jacks
Sunken concrete crosses grown into an artificial reef
Forty-eight life-size figures in a circle on the seabed at 4 m
Buddhist statues and Hindu temple fragments overgrown with coral