Lanzarote & Museo Atlántico

Two bases on the south coast carry most of the diving. Centres in Puerto del Carmen work out of Playa Chica, a cove where divers kit up on the promenade, walk down to the sand and are over rock within a minute or two, which makes three tanks in a day realistic and keeps costs down. The Museo Atlántico is a separate outing: a short boat run from Marina Rubicón in Playa Blanca, a descent line onto the sand, and access only through authorised centres on a ticket, so it is booked on its own rather than slotted into a shore day.

The rock is young basalt and it behaves nothing like limestone or coral. Instead of a continuous reef there are ridges and spurs running seaward onto black sand, lava tubes that take you in one mouth and out another, and boulder piles with dark overhangs beneath them. Sand and rock alternate the whole way along, and the grains are coarse volcanic grit rather than fine silt, so they drop back down quickly when a fin catches them.

The museum reads as a set of separate installations spread across a flat sand floor rather than one continuous field, so it dives as a slow loop from group to group: figures walking toward a wall pierced by a single doorway, a crowded boat, a mass of bodies packed together on the seabed. It rewards a camera and a guide who knows the running order. Playa Chica is the opposite proposition, one entry with a fan of routes off it, from a shallow sand bowl used for training to tube and cavern lines that want a torch and some experience.

It suits divers after volume rather than one set-piece. A week can be filled without repeating much, and photographers do well on the black sand, where small subjects sit against a plain dark background instead of a busy reef. It also holds up outside summer: no month drops off the calendar here, and the quieter shoulder weeks trade a couple of degrees of warmth for far fewer divers in the water.