Bonaire National Marine Park

Established in 1979, it is one of the oldest marine reserves in the world and covers some 2,700 hectares.

In practice it means that every time you enter the sea here, you are in a protected area. There are more than eighty public dive sites inside it, marked from the road by yellow stones. Anchoring is forbidden, nothing may be taken out — no shells, no coral, alive or dead — and gloves are not allowed, because people wearing them hold on to the reef.

Everyone entering the water needs the STINAPA nature fee, valid for the calendar year and paid online in advance; you must be able to show proof. The park is managed by STINAPA Bonaire, a foundation, and the fee is what pays for the moorings, the rangers and the reef monitoring.

You enter it wherever you enter the sea. The sheltered west coast is where almost everything happens — from the shore at any of the yellow-stoned sites between Kralendijk and Karpata, or by boat to Klein Bonaire — while the windward east side is rough and largely off limits to swimmers. Nothing here is more than forty minutes' drive from town.

It is open water, so there are no opening hours and no season: the park is there every day of the year. Mornings are the calmer half of the day, before the trade wind builds after eleven, and the water sits between twenty-six and twenty-nine degrees all year. A shore dive takes an hour with the walk in and out, a snorkel half that, a boat trip to Klein Bonaire half a day.