Palavas-les-Flots, Carnon & Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone

Everything named here is a boat dive out of the port at Palavas, on the right bank of the Lez, or the marina at Carnon, and the runs are short: operators put most sites at about 15 minutes of navigation, and Les 3 Arches only 400 m off the beach between the two towns. Plongée Carnon has worked the coast since 1992 with a 12 m boat, Bulles Plongée sits on Maguelone beach 10 km from Montpellier, and the associative club Octopus Plongée dives out of Palavas, with a fifth club registered along the coast at La Grande-Motte. Aventure Plongée is open all year and seven days a week in July and August, and dives the Étang de Thau lagoon out of season.

The ground is rock bank rather than reef: shallow plateaus of scree, faults and holes ending on open sand. Le Roc is a broad plateau at 8 to 14 m with a white-sand valley along its west face; M109, off Villeneuve-lès-Maguelone, is a 60 by 40 m rock split by one large fault between 6 and 11 m; Suchard, at 12 to 17 m, sits on the southern face of the last rock banks before the open bottom. La Citerne is a lone metal cistern on sand at about 11 m that acts as an artificial reef. Nudibranchs are the local speciality at Rocalucas and Nudi 38, and congers and lobsters hold in the cavities at Les Moures.

The area suits divers based around Montpellier, club divers working through the French ladder, and macro photographers content at 10 to 15 m; the shallow banks are honest beginner ground and the wrecks are small and easy to read. It is not a visibility destination, with logged dives running 1 to 4 m from January into May, and it has no wall and little depth: the one deep entry attached to the coast, the trawler Le Jack at 45 m, carries catalogue coordinates 17 km adrift of every other site and appears on no local club's site list. Anyone wanting walls, gorgonians or deep wrecks should look further along the Gulf of Lion, towards Sète 20 km west or Cap d'Agde at 40 km.