Aqaba Diving: Seven Kilometres of Coast, and the Wrecks Put There on Purpose

Jordan has 27 kilometres of coast, and 7 of them are the reserve

Start with the number that shapes everything else. The Jordanian shoreline falls entirely within the Gulf of Aqaba and extends to a maximum of 27 kilometres. That is the country’s only access to the sea, and it carries the commercial ports, the industrial complex, the tourist beaches, a marine science station and every dive site in the kingdom at once.

A third of it was bought. In 1965 King Hussein traded 6,000 square kilometres of Jordanian desert to Saudi Arabia in exchange for another 12 kilometres of coast south of Aqaba. The reefs divers now visit sit on ground that entered Jordan through a land swap.

Along that coast runs a discontinuous belt of fringing reef about 13 kilometres long. The Aqaba Marine Reserve protects 7 kilometres of the shoreline: from the southern boundary of the Passenger Terminal in the north to the Royal Diving Club in the south. Its landward limit lies 50 metres east of the mean high water mark and its seaward limit 350 metres west of it.

So the protected area is a ribbon. It comes to 2.8 square kilometres out of the 96 square kilometres of Jordanian territorial water, roughly 3 per cent. Seven of 27 kilometres works out at 26 per cent of the coast, which is the figure the management plan uses; the IUCN Green List entry for the same site says 27 per cent, and Green Fins has published 30.

The gulf itself is 180 kilometres long and between 5 and 25 kilometres wide, with mountains rising steeply on both sides. Jordan holds the eastern corner of its head, Israel holds Eilat to the north-west, Saudi Arabia the coast to the south, and Egypt the Sinai shore opposite, where Dahab sits.

Who writes the diving rules here: ASEZA, a by-law and Instruction 85

There is no national parks agency between you and the water in Aqaba. The Aqaba Special Economic Zone Authority is the autonomous manager, regulator and developer of the zone, and it established the Aqaba Marine Park in 1997. The governing instrument is the Aqaba Marine Park By-Law No. 22 of 2001, issued under the Aqaba Special Economic Zone Law No. 32 of 2000.

The status changed recently. King Abdullah II directed on 3 June 2020 that the park be declared a national marine reserve. A Board of Commissioners decision, No. 38 of 2020, started the process, and the cabinet declared the Aqaba Marine Reserve on 8 December 2020, the first in Jordan. In 2024 the site was added to the IUCN Green List of Protected and Conserved Areas under IUCN category VI.

Six sets of instructions sit under the by-law and they are worth knowing by number. Instruction No. 85 of 2005 regulates diving, covering licensing, registration and entry points. Instruction No. 84 governs boats and what dive boats must do on entering. Instruction No. 86 covers underwater clean-up dives, No. 82 covers scientific research and No. 161 of 2014 covers marine sports.

Instruction No. 83 of 2005 is the one that changes what you will see. It regulates entry to the park and prohibits all forms of fishing inside it, naming the taking of coloured coral reef fish explicitly, and it prohibits transferring or removing any organisms, sediments or corals for any purpose without a special permit from the chief commissioner.

One narrow exception survives. Inside the reserve, fishing is permitted only for the collection of live bait, and only in the early morning hours until nine o’clock, a concession to fishermen who have almost nowhere else to work. Everything else is pushed outside the boundary, to pelagic water within 100 metres of depth and away from ports, docks and border areas.

Enforcement is the park’s own staff. Ten of the 26 people on its books are rangers, and the team issues the annual permits that dive centres, glass-bottom boats and recreational boats operate under, runs clean-up dives and acts as lifeguards. Entry to the beaches is free.

The Cedar Pride, the C-130 and the tanks were all put there deliberately

A 7-kilometre reef strip cannot absorb unlimited divers, and Aqaba’s answer has been to manufacture attractions on sand where the coral is not. The oldest is the Cedar Pride, a Lebanese freighter that took extensive fire damage and was scuttled for divers in 1985, roughly 150 metres offshore, lying on her port side across two reefs at a maximum depth of 26 metres.

Two details around her are triangulated rather than official. The engine-room fire that finished her is dated to 1 August 1982 in Aqaba port, and the scuttling to 16 November 1985, by the dive press and by operators rather than by a government record. Published maximum depths vary between 26 and 28 metres.

The C-130 Hercules followed in 2017. It is 30 metres long with a 40-metre wingspan, it lies flat on its belly on a sand bed at an average maximum depth of 16 metres, and it is almost always visible from the surface. It sits close enough to the Cedar Pride and to the tank that experienced divers string them together.

Then came the Underwater Military Museum in 2019, and it is the most unusual thing in the water here. Decommissioned hardware donated by the Jordan Armed Forces-Arab Army was laid out along the seabed to mimic a tactical battle formation: tanks of different sizes, an ambulance, a military crane, a troop carrier and a combat helicopter.

The count is disputed. The reserve management plan says 21 relics of battle; reports from the launch in July 2019 say 19 pieces of hardware. Both agree on what matters environmentally, which is that the location was chosen specifically for its lack of coral and other marine life, and both agree that snorkellers and glass-bottom boats can see part of it.

Two more wrecks round out the list and neither is a beginner dive. The cargo ship Al Shorouq was scuttled in 2008, drifted from the shallower position intended for her, and now has her bow at 38 metres and her stern near 60. The crane barge Tayoung lies on her starboard side near the Japanese Gardens, with a swim-through at the wheelhouse.

The oldest relic was not placed at all. An M42 Duster tank, found in 1999, sits on sand under just 6 metres of water, which makes it a snorkelling and freediving site as much as a scuba one, and a useful safety stop on the way back from the canyons nearby.

Almost every dive site in Aqaba starts on the beach

This is the practical fact that sets Aqaba apart from the rest of the Red Sea. The reserve management plan tabulates 30 dive sites inside the boundary. Exactly one of them, Paradise, is described as reachable by boat only. One more, the Marine Science Station site, is accessible by beach or boat but open only for research with permission.

Everything else can be walked into. The sites are strung in a line down the coast road in rough north-to-south order, each one a bay or a reef with a shore entry, and the boats mostly exist to link two of them in a single dive rather than to reach anything unreachable. That is a very different day from a liveaboard coast.

The profiles reflect it. Gorgone I has an entry channel 3 metres wide and 4 metres deep through the reef and bottoms out at 18 metres. Seven Sisters begins at 3 metres and runs down to 16. Black Rock starts as a coral garden just below the surface and extends about 30 metres out before dropping away steeply. The reef zones dived here run from flat and crest to upper and lower slope, down to a maximum of 30 metres.

There is a purpose-built shallow as well. Baby Bubbles offers standing depth down to 5 metres on flat sand, described in the plan as a place to practise without any danger of damaging corals. Six public beaches sit inside the reserve with parking, kiosks, camping areas and rescue units, mooring has been installed at King Abdullah Reef South, and the Cedar Pride is marked by a surface buoy. The shore diving list collects coasts that work this way.

The deep exceptions are real and they are sharp. Tarmac Five drops into a gulley starting at 40 metres and falling past 75, known as Kleta’s Wall after the German dive master who explored it in 1996. Moon Valley and Paradise reach past 40. The shallow coast has a technical basement, and the two are a few fin kicks apart.

What the water does through the year in the Gulf of Aqaba

Sea surface temperature in this gulf runs from a winter low of about 20.5°C in February to over 27°C in late summer, usually September. That is a warm-temperate winter and a tropical summer in the same 27 kilometres, and it is the single planning number that decides what you pack.

The column beneath behaves in a way that matters if you go deep. Through summer the gulf is thermally stratified with a strong thermocline, and below roughly 200 metres the water sits at a constant 21.5°C. As the surface cools in winter the thermocline collapses and the upper and lower layers mix, which is the annual event that resets the whole basin.

A measured series exists for the Jordanian side. A study of offshore water off Jordan between 2013 and 2015 sampled the upper 400 metres and put the average temperature across all of it at 23.03 ± 1.58°C, with the column well mixed from February to April and stratified in July and August. Average salinity came out at 40.60 ± 0.10 practical salinity units, against an ocean average nearer 35.

The salt is worth a thought before you weight yourself. Gulf salinity runs between 40.3 and 41.6 practical salinity units because there is no freshwater input and evaporation is relentless, so a belt set for the Andaman Sea will be light. For neoprene, a 5 mm suit covers the cold end from January into April, a 3 mm is comfortable through the late-summer peak, and a hood earns its place in February. Our travel wetsuit guide covers the trade-offs.

The long trend is upward and it has been measured. Monthly instrument casts at a station in the northern gulf from January 2003 to December 2022 found warming at every depth: about 0.025°C per year at 20 metres, roughly 0.014 at 150 metres and 0.015 in deep water. The authors link it to fewer winter deep-mixing events and to heat carried north from the southern part of the gulf.

Why researchers keep coming back to these reefs

Aqaba sits inside the one piece of the Red Sea that has become a scientific argument. The northern end of this gulf holds reef-building corals that keep not bleaching when the thermal stress says they should, and the case for it is published rather than promotional.

The landmark comparison appeared in Global Change Biology in 2018. Examining sea surface temperature and bleaching records from 1982 to 2012, it found that the northern Red Sea had not experienced mass bleaching despite Degree Heating Weeks above 15, while severe bleaching was restricted to the central and southern Red Sea, where thermal stress was far less intense at under 4 Degree Heating Weeks. The paper proposed the region as a thermal refuge of global importance.

Then the heatwaves came and the claim held. A Category II marine heatwave in summer 2021 pushed sea surface temperature in this gulf to 31°C, 3.5°C above the local summer maximum of 27.5, for 34 days and 8 Degree Heating Weeks at bleaching alert level 2. Tagged colonies of Stylophora pistillata and Pocillopora damicornis came through with no mortality and no bleaching.

A 2025 paper followed four consecutive summers, moderate in 2022, strong in 2021 and 2023 and severe in 2024. The 2024 event lasted 113 days, sea surface temperature reached 32.6°C, 3.4°C above the long-term average, and it accumulated 30 Degree Heating Weeks, the highest thermal stress recorded anywhere on earth that year. Both species persisted without bleaching and held their energy reserves.

One boundary matters to the claim. That tagged-colony work is done at the head of the gulf on the Israeli side, at the Interuniversity Institute in Eilat, not on Jordanian reefs. It is the same semi-enclosed basin a short distance across the water, and Aqaba’s own management plan and its IUCN Green List entry both record reefs unaffected by bleaching, but the measurements and the reserve are not the same place.

What lives on those reefs is well counted. 157 hard coral species are recorded in the gulf and all of them confirmed inside the reserve: 153 scleractinian corals, one organ pipe coral and three fire corals, across 15 families and 59 genera. Fifteen of the 23 known Red Sea endemic coral species have been found in Jordan.

The fish count disagrees with itself. The management plan and the IUCN Green List both give 507 species in 109 families; the authority’s own reserve page says 512. Hawksbill turtles are the most widely distributed of the three confirmed turtle species, with the highest recorded population toward Black Rock.

The port moved south and took 32,509 square metres of coral with it

The same 27 kilometres that hold the diving hold Jordan’s entire seaborne trade, and the collision has a number attached. Relocating ports to the southern beach of Aqaba near the Saudi border directly affected an estimated 32,509 square metres of hard coral, which is the kind of figure a management plan usually rounds away.

The response was transplantation, and some of it is now a dive site. Coral has been moved onto damaged reefs since 2012 using cement and metal structural units. In 2013 many corals were carried from the Saudi border area to the Japanese Gardens to save them from destruction by the new port facility, so part of one of the best reefs here arrived by boat.

The Artificial Tunnel, also called the Cave, exists for the same reason. It was established after the port relocation, planted with coral by local specialists and protected until the reef regenerated. It sits just south of the tank site and is reachable from shore.

Two ports still bracket the reserve to the north. The passenger port sits at its northern edge, just above the Marine Science Station beach, and the Aqaba Container Terminal lies north of that. Shipping and port activity is credited with 30 per cent of the marine litter recorded here, against 3 per cent from the fishing industry.

The ferry across to Egypt has its own line in the ledger. An estimated 19 million items enter the sea from the ferryboat each year, and the seasonal distribution of litter tracks passenger movements through late spring and summer. That is the traffic the reserve sits underneath.

Green Fins in Aqaba, and what a Certified Gold score actually is

Jordan became the fifteenth country to implement Green Fins, the UN Environment Programme initiative for marine tourism operators, announced on 28 June 2023. Five certified assessors and two coordinators were trained over a week that June, drawn from the Royal Jordanian Navy Forces, the Aqaba Marine Reserve and the University of Jordan, and the programme is run by the zone authority itself.

The scheme’s own definitions matter more than the badge. A Certified Member is an operator that has received an in-person assessment from a trained Green Fins assessor within the last 12 months. Assessors score the business out of 330 against a 15-point code of conduct, and the lower the score the lower the impact. Gold is 50 or less, Silver 150 or less, Bronze 200 or less, and 201 or more is a Restricted Member.

A Digital Member is a different thing entirely. The operator completes a self-evaluation of its own practices, picks four recommended solutions and builds an action plan. No assessor visits, and there is no minimum score to clear. Both appear in the same public register, so the membership type is the part to read.

The programme has published results for Aqaba. In its second year Green Fins reported a 51 per cent reduction in threats from marine tourism among members, anchoring damage eliminated, a 69 per cent reduction in diver contact with reefs, display and sale of marine life halted entirely, waste management improved by 46 per cent and chemical discharge cut by 28 per cent. Eleven Aqaba operators were listed as certified in May 2025.

Our own list is narrower and reads differently. The Aqaba operator list holds 10 businesses, read on 13 September 2026. Seven of the 10 are published by SSI in its register of affiliated centres, and 8 of the 10 publish a website. Three of the 10 appear in the Green Fins register, read on 15 August 2026.

Those three split in the way that counts. Two are Certified Gold Members, which means an assessor was physically on the boat within the previous 12 months and the operation scored 50 or less out of 330. The third is a Digital Member that self-evaluated. An in-person Green Fins assessment is rare across this directory, and Aqaba is one of the few places that has one.

Registers are also messier than they look. Of the 10 entries, 6 are filed under “Aqaba”, 1 under “AQABA” and 3 carry no town field at all, which is why a place-name search of a register misses businesses that are plainly there. Which registers can be read logs what each source returned and on what date.

The Jordan Pass, and the two-night rule that carries the visa fee

Entry to Jordan has one product attached to it that divers should know about before they book a flight. The Jordan Pass is a prepaid sightseeing package covering entry to more than 40 attractions, and it waives tourist entry visa fees on a condition: it must be bought before arrival in Jordan and the stay must be a minimum of two nights, which the operator counts as three days.

Three tiers are sold and the difference between them is small. Jordan Wanderer costs 70 Jordanian dinars and includes one day at Petra; Jordan Explorer costs 75 and includes two consecutive visit days; Jordan Expert costs 80 and includes three. All three carry the same visa fee waiver and the same list of attractions.

For a dive trip the arithmetic is simple. Any itinerary built around Aqaba clears the two-night threshold without trying, so the question is only whether you will use the inland entries.

Two things the pass does not cover are worth budgeting separately. Diving inside the reserve runs through centres holding an annual permit from the zone authority, and that is priced by the operator, not by the park. And hyperbaric cover sits outside any tourism product, which is what our dive insurance comparison is for.