Jardines de la Reina

Cuba'S Largest Marine Protected Area, An Archipelago Of Mangrove Keys And Reef Eighty Kilometres Offshore, Closed To Commercial Fishing And Reachable Only By Liveaboard · Jucaro, Ciego de Avila

Columbus named this archipelago for Queen Isabella and almost nobody has been there since. Two hundred and fifty mangrove keys and a long reef lie eighty kilometres off Cuba's southern coast, and because commercial fishing was banned here in the nineteen nineties and visitor numbers are capped by permit, it is repeatedly described by divers as what the Caribbean looked like fifty years ago. What that means in practice is sharks: Caribbean reef and silky sharks in numbers that are startling if you have dived anywhere else, nurse sharks under the ledges, goliath grouper the size of armchairs, and American crocodiles in the mangrove shallows. The fly fishing for bonefish, tarpon and permit is world famous. There is no hotel and no day trip: you live on a boat out of Jucaro, and you book it from abroad months in advance. The permit cap that makes that so inconvenient is the whole reason the place is still like this.

Jardines de la Reina, reached from Jucaro, Ciego de Avila, Jucaro, Ciego de Avila, Cuba

THERE IS NO GATE AND NO OPENING TIME because there is no land access. Visits are by LIVEABOARD BOAT from the port of JUCARO, four to six hours out, under a permit system with strict caps on how many people may be in the park at once. Trips run roughly a week at a time and are booked months ahead from abroad. Diving and fishing operate all year, weather permitting.

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