El Hierro

Everything happens in and around La Restinga. The dive centres sit on the small harbour, boats reach most sites within minutes of leaving it, and a two-tank morning has you back on the quay for lunch. The harbour doubles as a dive site: the sheltered water inside it is the usual check dive and the standard night dive, and you can walk in with a tank. Diving in the reserve is regulated and the centres handle the authorisations, which is part of why sites rarely feel crowded.

The seabed is young volcano rather than reef, all tongues of black lava, pillow formations, cracks and short tunnels with sand channels running between them. Sites divide roughly into shallow lava fields you can work slowly and detached pinnacles standing off the coast, where fish stack up on the current side and the rock falls away into open blue. The ground off the village was reshaped by the 2011 submarine eruption and has been recolonising since. What keeps the stretch so consistently diveable is the island itself, which blocks the prevailing north-easterly trades and leaves the south flat while the rest of the coast is exposed.

El Hierro rewards divers happy to dive the same handful of sites repeatedly and get to know them, and the clarity plus grouper that hold still draw underwater photographers. La Restinga is a working village with a short row of restaurants, a few apartments and early nights; the rest of the island, the wind-bent junipers of El Sabinar and the cliffs above El Golfo, is a winding drive away. There are no wrecks to speak of, and since no month is written off, a quiet winter week is a real option rather than a compromise.