At Anilao the Dive Fee Is Split Between Two Municipalities

Anilao is one barangay, and the dive sites cross a municipal boundary

Start with the naming, because it decides what you pay and who polices the water. Anilao is a barangay of Mabini, a municipality on the Calumpan Peninsula in Batangas province, and the peninsula divides Balayan Bay to the west from Batangas Bay to the east. Mabini covers 4,296 hectares with about 32 kilometres of coastline.

The barangay gave its name to a dive area much larger than itself. Divers in the 1970s parked at Anilao and took boats out, and the destinations they reached in Mabini, Bauan and Tingloy became known collectively by the name of the car park. Barangay Anilao has no dive site of its own.

The second municipality matters more than the maps suggest. Tingloy was part of Mabini until it was declared a separate municipality in 1955, covers 3,241 hectares and is reached by ferry. It holds Maricaban and Caban islands and the smaller Sombrero, Bonito and Malajibongmanoc, and a large share of the well known sites sit in its municipal waters, not Mabini’s.

That split is why the fee is collected twice, and why a boat leaving a Mabini resort often crosses a jurisdiction before the first descent.

Manila is close enough to change the shape of the week. The WWF case study puts the drive at 127 kilometres and two and a half hours, and records what that did to the dive market: weekend divers commonly stayed one night and made four dives, and surveyed divers came about once a month, with fewer than 5 per cent on a first dive.

The supply side grew to match. There were 10 registered resorts by the end of the 1980s, 23 by 1994 and 73 by 2006, more than half with diving facilities. Our Anilao operator list holds 9 businesses, read on 21 August 2026.

The licence a Philippine dive shop has to hold, and who issues it

The Philippines is unusual in this directory because a national body accredits dive businesses by name. The Philippine Commission on Sports Scuba Diving was created by Letter of Instruction No. 745, issued on 29 September 1978, and it now sits under the Department of Tourism with an office on Sen. Gil Puyat Avenue in Makati City.

The obligation is flat. Its Rules and Regulations Governing the Business of Sport Scuba Diving, dated 28 January 2009, state that no person, natural or juridical, shall operate or manage a scuba diving establishment without first being licensed by the commission. Dive professionals need their own licence.

The 2003 accreditation rules define the certificate and price it. Accreditation is a certification recognising compliance with the minimum standards required in the operation of a sports scuba diving establishment or as a diving professional. It is valid for one year from the date of issuance. The annual fee for a professional dive centre, shop or facility is 2,000 pesos, a branch 500, an instructor 1,000 and a divemaster 750.

What has to be true to get it is specific. An establishment registers with the SEC or the Bureau of Domestic Trade, holds local government permits, submits an employee list, and staffs at least one divemaster and one instructor. Dive boats and bancas need Philippine Coast Guard permits and MARINA registration. Compressor output is capped at 500 ppm carbon dioxide, 20 ppm carbon monoxide and 5 mg per cubic metre of oil.

The 2009 rules add cover and conduct. Accident liability insurance is mandatory for all dive establishments and dive professionals, and destroying coral, harming endangered species, spearfishing and unauthorised salvage of artefacts are prohibited. Liveaboard vessels carry their own fittings list, down to one toilet and shower per six passengers.

One thing the scheme does not currently do is publish who holds it. As of September 2026 the commission’s website carries a home page and an application page linking to two Google Forms, with no list of accredited establishments, so the certificate on the wall is the only thing a diver can read. Which registers can be read logs what each source returned and on what date.

A second label on Anilao walls means something different. The Department of Tourism accredits tourism enterprises, including accommodation, so a dive resort can hold that without being a licensed dive establishment.

What the Verde Island Passage study actually measured

Anilao is sold on a single phrase, and the phrase is worth unpicking, because the paper behind it says something narrower and more useful. Kent Carpenter and Victor Springer published The center of the center of marine shore fish biodiversity: the Philippine Islands in Environmental Biology of Fishes in 2005.

The abstract states the method plainly. Analysis of distribution data for 2,983 species identifies a peak of marine biodiversity in the central Philippine Islands, with a secondary peak between peninsular Malaysia and Sumatra, the pattern repeated across habitat and higher taxa classes and strongest for marine shore fishes.

The comparison the paper draws is with Indonesia, not with the world. Its own words are that there is a higher concentration of species per unit area in the Philippines than anywhere in Indonesia, including Wallacea, and that special attention to marine conservation in the Philippines is justified by its identification as an epicentre of biodiversity and evolution.

The number everybody quotes is not in that abstract. 1,736 overlapping marine species over a 10 kilometre area appears in the Verde Island Passage Marine Corridor management plan framework, the 2007 document written in response to Executive Order No. 578 of 8 November 2006, which credits the figure to Carpenter and Springer and calls the result the highest concentration of marine life in the world.

So the defensible version is this. The passage lies inside the region the peer-reviewed work identifies as richest for shore fishes per unit area, and the passage-specific count is a government framework’s rendering of that work rather than a line in the paper. The passage itself runs between southern Batangas and northern Mindoro, is divided by Verde Island into a North Pass and a South Pass, and covers roughly 1.4 million hectares across five provinces.

The conservation fee is a municipal ordinance, and both towns collect

Anilao’s diver fee is one of the older user-fee schemes in Philippine marine management. WWF-Philippines surveyed more than 230 divers in 2000 and found 97 per cent of Filipinos and 86 per cent of foreigners willing to pay a per-visit surcharge for the reefs. The study recommended 400 pesos per diver for a weekend.

The divers negotiated it down. At a consultation in August 2002 they agreed to 50 pesos per day of diving, with an annual pass at 1,000 pesos. The Mabini ordinance passed in February 2003, collection started in September 2003 and the scheme launched that November.

Tingloy passed its own ordinance in late 2003 and then could not collect, because every resort and dive shop was in Mabini. The fix took until September 2005: Mabini collects on Tingloy’s behalf, the proceeds are split 50-50 after administrative expenses, and the unified pass cost 100 pesos a day or 1,800 pesos a year for access to sites in both municipalities.

Enforcement runs through tanks and boats. A resort that lets guests dive without a pass has air tanks confiscated, redeemable on payment of a 2,000 peso penalty. A boat operator caught carrying divers without passes is fined 1,000 pesos and faces a 15-day licence suspension. Each detached ticket stub is worth 10 pesos back to the boat operator. Between September 2003 and December 2006 the scheme collected 5,628,130 pesos.

The current amount is where sources stop agreeing. A resort rate sheet valid for the 2026 calendar year gives 300 pesos per person per boat diving day, not included in package rates; news reporting from 2018 gives 200 pesos per diver with 50 of it going to Tingloy. Both are stated here because the fee is set by ordinance and has been raised more than once.

The framework around it was rewritten recently. Ordinance No. 031-2023, the Mabini Integrated Coastal Management Code of 2023, was signed on 27 October 2023 and took effect on 19 January 2024. It creates an Integrated Coastal Management Office, a community law enforcement group and an Integrated Coastal Management Trust Fund holding the regulatory fees and fines, and it regulates free diving and coral propagation work.

The sanctuaries off Mabini and Tingloy, declared in 1991 and 2002

Protection here predates the fee by twelve years. A national marine park covering Sombrero Island and parts of Caban and Maricaban was proposed in 1982 and never made legal. Before that, in 1978, a presidential decree declared the islands and reefs a tourism zone and restricted spearfishing on scuba.

The working instrument arrived in 1991, when Mabini declared its first marine reserve by municipal ordinance and established three sanctuaries inside it. Their areas are recorded as Cathedral at 22.9 hectares, Arthur’s Rock at 17.9 hectares and Twin Rocks at 15.3 hectares. Baseline data were collected on all three that same year.

Tingloy followed in 2002 with the Batalang Bato Marine Sanctuary at Pulang Buli reef, off Maricaban Island. Divers know the site by the red buri palm facing it; the ordinance uses the local name. It was closed to fishing and to diving alike, the one protected patch here that divers are not meant to enter.

The monitoring series shows what the closures did. A 2005 expedition surveying nine sites across the two municipalities found live hard coral cover from 20.3 per cent at White Sand Reef to 75.3 per cent at Cathedral Reef Sanctuary at 7 to 8 metres, with Cathedral up from 53.8 per cent in 2001.

Fish told a sharper story. Target fish density was lowest at White House Reef, outside any sanctuary, at 18.0 individuals per 500 square metres, and highest inside Batalang Bato at 267.2. Batalang Bato also carried the highest target fish biomass at 93.87 kilograms per 500 square metres and showed a 153.2 per cent increase in target fish since 2001.

Sanctuary status did not guarantee it. Cathedral Reef Sanctuary recorded a 77.3 per cent decline in target fish over the same four years, and butterflyfish at Cathedral Rock fell from 19 species in 2001 to 5 in 2005, while Sombrero Island rose from 17 to 23. The report attributes anchor damage at non-sanctuary dive sites as a direct cause of rubble.

Coral cover and reef fish counts for Mabini and Tingloy

A passage-wide baseline puts the Anilao reefs in their actual position. Surveys carried out in 2007 and 2008 covered 41 stations across eight municipalities around the passage, using video and photo transects.

Overall mean live hard coral cover across the passage came to 24 per cent, the poor category on the Philippine scale, and not one of the eight municipalities reached the good band.

Mabini finished top of the eight. Its live hard coral cover was 33.8 per cent, the highest in the survey, and still only fair. Tingloy, which holds many of the island sites, came in at 19.2 per cent and sat in the poor category alongside Calatagan at 24.2, Lubang at 24.8 and San Juan at 19.6. Batangas City was last at 12.9.

Fish diversity ran the other way for Tingloy. Mabini recorded the highest reef fish species richness on the belt transects with 151 species, followed by Lubang at 147, Tingloy at 142 and Batangas City at 139. Mabini also had the most coral genera at 45, with Tingloy at 41. Mabini and Tingloy each contributed only three survey stations, so these are small samples of a long coastline.

The national picture gives that 33.8 some scale. A nationwide assessment of 166 stations in 31 provinces, sampled from 2015 to 2017, put average hard coral cover weighted by reef area at 22 per cent. No station fell in the excellent category, and more than 90 per cent were poor or fair.

The projections are the least comfortable numbers in the file. Modelled loss of live hard coral cover from rising sea surface temperature ran from 3 to 22 per cent across the passage, and Mabini at 11 to 22 and Tingloy at 14 to 21 were the two most vulnerable, because their reefs carry more of the thermally sensitive acroporids and pocilloporids. Satellite records showed the largest cover losses at Lubang and Maricaban.

Macro and muck, and what a week of it looks like

Anilao’s reputation is not built on big animals. The signature dive is a slow crawl over black volcanic sand, rubble and sponge at 5 to 20 metres, hunting animals measured in centimetres, which is the working definition of macro and muck diving.

The taxonomy backs the habit. A coral survey of Batangas in 2003 recorded 319 species and 74 genera of hard corals, a figure updated to 338 after further Anilao work in July 2007. Those counts are reported through the WWF case study rather than published as a paper of their own.

The institutional expeditions have been repeat visitors. The California Academy of Sciences ran biodiversity expeditions to the passage in 2011, 2014 and 2015. The 2014 trip spent seven weeks working sites including Mabini, Balayan Bay to Calatagan and the waters around Lubang, and collected over 400 marine species.

The 2015 expedition put nearly 50 scientists on the eastern half of the passage, including the deep, high-current water around Verde Island, working from the surface down into the twilight zone between 200 and 500 feet. It returned more than 100 species likely new to science, including more than 40 new nudibranchs.

That shapes the week. Four dives a day, most under 20 metres, with the interesting part happening inside a metre of sand. A focus light and a good dive torch do more work here than a bigger camera; the other Philippine muck coast, Dauin, reads the same way.

Amihan, habagat, and which way the passage flows

Two monsoons set the year, and they are named locally. The northeast monsoon, the amihan, dominates the wind field over this water from November to March, with wind speeds generally 8 to 10 metres per second. The southwest monsoon, the habagat, runs June to October at under 5 metres per second, interrupted by spikes tied to typhoons.

PAGASA divides the national year differently. It gives a rainy season from June to November and a dry season from December to May, split into a cool dry period from December to February and a hot dry period from March to May. The reported peak dive season here runs March to June.

The direction of the water follows the wind. Net flow in the Verde Island Passage runs west during the northeast monsoon and east during the southwest monsoon, and the passage is at its shallowest and narrowest near Verde Island itself. That reversal is the reason a site can behave differently in January and in August at the same state of tide.

Wave height is the surprise. Because the passage is narrow, the fetch is short and waves do not develop: modelled significant wave heights were 0.25 metres in 1998, 0.35 in 1997 and 0.5 metres in 2008. Even a simulated 40 knot onshore wind raised sea level by only 0.01 to 0.04 metres on the western side.

So the limiting factor is current rather than swell. The sheltered Mabini shoreline holds up when the strait does not, and the exposed corners and the water around Verde Island turn into drifts. Our drift diving list covers the technique; Puerto Galera sits on the Mindoro side of the same water.

The 2023 oil spill and what reached Maricaban Island

The passage carries the traffic as well as the reefs. Batangas hosts the country’s second largest international port, two of its three oil refineries and twelve industrial estates, and fourteen municipalities and one city border the passage. Vessel-sourced pollution was already listed as a principal threat in the 2007 framework.

The event came on 28 February 2023, when the tanker MT Princess Empress sank off Naujan in Oriental Mindoro. Published cargo figures disagree: the Philippine Coast Guard was reported as 900,000 litres of industrial fuel and departmental situation reports give 800,000 litres of industrial fuel oil. The wreck was located at 389 metres.

It reached Batangas three weeks later. The Coast Guard confirmed on 20 March 2023 that oil had arrived in the province, with sightings around Verde Island about 4.4 nautical miles offshore. Tingloy was named among the coastal areas placed under monitoring, alongside San Juan, Lobo and Calatagan, which puts the Maricaban Island dive sites inside the affected zone.

The scale was national. By early April 2023 the slick had spread across roughly 155 miles and threatened more than 20 marine protected areas, with 193,436 people in 40,897 families recorded as affected across Oriental Mindoro, Batangas, Palawan and Antique.

The legal frame was already in place and did not prevent it. Executive Order No. 578 of 2006 established the national policy on biological diversity and named the Verde Island Passage Marine Corridor specifically, creating a task force to produce a management plan within 120 days. The corridor supports over 7 million people, and their livelihoods are what a spill reaches first. Dive medical cover sits outside all of this, which is what our dive insurance comparison is for.