Maria La Gorda is a dive resort conceived and maintained for the diving community. Everything and everyone at the hotels, bars and resort area, live, speak and breathe diving – 24/7. Basically, when you say Maria La Gorda in Cuba, everyone immediately thinks “Diving”.
Yes, the Dive Resort Maria la Gorda has quite simply some of the best diving sites in the whole of Cuba!
Why is Maria La Gorda such a popular diving resort?
Primarily, the San Antonio and Pinar del Rio western coastline features some unusual sea currents and unique microclimate weather systems. Warmer waters from the southern Caribbean Sea meet head-on with cooler waters from the Gulf of Mexico causing unusual deep water currents and especially treacherous conditions for ships and boats. Throughout history, this area of Cuba has notched up 100s of missing and lost vessels, many of which now make up the diving heaven of shipwrecks strewn all along the Maria La Gorda Coastline.
Of course, for corsairs and pirates this was the land of opportunity. Ships in difficulty, wreckages and goods washed up onto the shore, a true bonanza for those marauders who made Maria La Gorda and this region Cuba their home in the 14th to 17th century.
You’ll find that from disaster comes opportunity, in this case for us diving enthusiasts, by way of numerous sunken Galleons, anchors, cannons and many more artifacts literally littering the ocean floor at Maria La Gorda. Furthermore, the geographic location of Maria La Gorda, short distance from Havana and excellent road network on which to cover the 300 or so kilometers, makes Maria La Gorda probably the most perfect and easily accessible dive centers in the Caribbean if not the western hemisphere. Of course, the final caveat is that it remains largely undiscovered. With Americans still banned from Cuba, the main bulk of North American divers are conspicuous, if only by their absence.
Discovering Maria La Gorda for yourself is the next step.