diving7seas
D ivers don’ t have to go looking for the large fish in the Garajau Marine Protected Area in the south-east of the Portuguese island of Madeira. They’ re simply there because that’ s where they live. And they’ ve been living there un disturbed since 1986, thanks to regular speedboat patrols by the coastguard. Fishing and underwater hunting – that’ s a part of the past here. The Garajau Nature Reserve was, at the time, the very first underwater park in the whole of Portugal; in 2021, the autonomous region of Madeira claimed to have created the largest marine protected area in Europe and the North Atlantic. Within the 2,677-square-kilometre area of open waters, all fishing and the extraction of raw materials are prohibited.
For divers, the nature reserve directly off the coast between Lazareto and Ponta da Oliveira is particularly interesting, and the German dive centre Manta Diving Madeira has been located right within this reserve for many years. Furthermore, it holds a licence to operate its dive boat within this area and can therefore
Diversity is the order of the( or better: every) day in the marine reserve: there are big fish( bottom left), shoals( top right) and beautiful underwater landscapes( bottom right)
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