SIERRA HELADA
Within this natural park, we have 3 main dive sites:
La cueva del elefante
Located between Altea and Benidorm, this is an underwater cave known as the Elephant Cave, due to the rock formation above the entrance. The entrance to the cave is 12 metres deep in crystal clear water, once you reach the end of the cave you can see good examples of stalactites inside the chamber. The cave itself is 25 metres long.
La cueva del enanito
This is a shallow dive with a maximum of -14mts and an average of about -8mts, but it is a particularly exciting circuit with beautiful caves and chimneys that will continually amaze you like windows to the blue.
As soon as we descend we look for the wall and there we find the entrance at -8m to the cave of El Enanito, with a considerable entrance but little interior route. After accessing it we can ascend to the surface where there is an air bubble. We go back down just a couple of metres to see an illuminated tunnel that shows us the exit through a window just above the entrance. Once in the open sea the route consists of leaving the wall to the left, which is profusely covered with yellow encrusting anemone. This wall sometimes bends to the left, although if we follow the stones that run more or less continuously parallel to it, on a course of about 60º, we will come to some piled up cyclopedic stones that we can scrutinise and then take a 330º course to the wall, where after being forced to negotiate one of these huge boulders and briefly ascend to only -3mts, we drop back down to -10mts and access the Elephant Cave, which leads into the interior of the mountain and allows us to reach the surface where there is also an air bubble. Finally we descend and come out to the open sea and return to the starting point, now leaving the wall to our right.
Isla mitjana
A small island located in front of the high cliffs of the Serra Gelada. Its main characteristic is the quantity of octopuses that can be found during a single dive, which is why it is also known as the “Island of Octopuses”.
