Algarve — Ocean Revival

Every dive starts at a marina. Boats leave Portimão for a short run offshore, tie into one of the site's mooring buoys, and divers go down the line onto a known point of the ship, so there is no navigation puzzle and no drift to manage. Two-tank mornings are the standard product, with the surface interval spent aboard. Nitrox is worth taking, because the profiles are square: you drop to working depth quickly and stay there for most of the dive.

The hulls sit on open sand rather than on reef, and that changes how they read. Nothing competes with the ship for attention, the pale bottom throws light back up under the superstructure, and each one appears as a silhouette well before any detail resolves. They differ mainly in scale: the two smaller vessels can be circled and understood in a single dive, while the larger pair take several visits before the layout makes sense, so a day is usually built by pairing one big ship with one small one.

Openings were cut and fittings stripped before the ships went down, and that matters more for what it allows than for how it looks: corridors you can turn round in, doorways without doors, square cuts in the deck dropping daylight into the compartments beneath, so a line can be run with the exit in sight. Most centres teach wreck courses on the ships themselves. The steel photographs well too, with masts, bridge wings and deck fittings still reading clearly under the growth picked up since scuttling.

It suits divers who like structure and are comfortable at recreational depth in Atlantic water; a semi-dry earns its keep outside high summer, and boats do get cancelled when the swell builds. Newer divers get plenty from deck level, and from the natural limestone reef and caves off Lagos to the west, which many centres pair with the wrecks across a few days. The season runs April to October, thins out in March and November, and stops between December and February.