Tabarka

This is small-town diving run out of a working harbour. Boats leave for sites a few minutes off the headland, do two dives with a break in between, and are back for lunch; there is no shore diving in the mix, so the day is built around the boat and the wind. The season runs from roughly May to October, so the summer weeks are busy with Tunisian and European divers and the shoulder months can be very quiet.

Underwater, the rock that forms the spires along the shoreline continues as submerged massifs, split by tunnels, arches and swim-throughs wide enough to pass through in comfort. The shallow parts are bright and broken up, good for long, easy dives, while the seaward faces drop into shaded overhangs where red coral still grows at 30–40 m, on a coast that supplied Europe's coral trade for centuries. Visibility is decent rather than exceptional, 10–30 m, and drops after a blow.

The groupers are the reason most divers come back. Decades of protection have made them unusually bold, and at the boulder sites they will hold position and inspect a diver instead of retreating into the rock, which makes for straightforward photography. La Galite, the archipelago offshore, is the bigger day out and the harder one to secure: a long open crossing, only worth attempting in settled summer weather, holding one of the densest grouper populations in the Mediterranean.

Open Water divers are well served by the shallow massifs, but the coral overhangs sit deep enough to want Advanced training and careful gas planning, so the area repays divers who already have some Mediterranean rock diving behind them. Anyone expecting wrecks, big pelagics or a polished resort operation should look elsewhere. What Tabarka offers is unfussy diving on good rock, in the one corner of North Africa with a dive scene of its own.