Bonaire vs Curaçao: Which for Shore Diving?

by Yannick SchrothSep 5, 20266 min read

Shore entry at Bonaire, one of the two islands, not both. Photo: Kris Mikael Krister, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 3.0.

Two lists built from different registers

The gap in the counts is partly a gap in what the registers publish. Bonaire's page is built from the Green Fins member register alone: all 8 of its operators are in it, and an operator on Bonaire that never joined Green Fins is not on our page. Curaçao's 22 come mostly from the SSI training centre register, 19 of them, with 4 also in Green Fins.

So 22 against 8 is not "Curaçao has three times the dive centres". It is two lists drawn from different sources. What both counts do settle is that neither island is short of operators.

The Green Fins level, and why it is not what people think

Green Fins publishes membership at several levels, and the difference between them is the whole point. A Certified member has been assessed in person against a published standard within the last twelve months. A Digital Member completed a self-evaluation online and nobody visited.

Every Green Fins member on both islands is a Digital Member. That is worth knowing before the badge does any work in your decision: it means the operator filled in a form about itself, which is the same kind of claim as anything else on its own website.

The fee that only one island charges

STINAPA manages Bonaire's marine park and charges a nature fee for anyone entering the water, with a separate rate for divers. It is not a donation, not a dive-centre surcharge, and not optional; you carry the tag. Budget for it and buy it before you plan your first dive rather than at the shop counter.

Curaçao has no equivalent island-wide fee. That is a genuine cost difference between two islands 50 kilometres apart, and it is the kind of thing that does not show up in a count of dive centres.

And the other island's park manager, for comparison

The fee section above rests on Bonaire's side of the ledger. It is worth naming who holds the other side, because the absence of a charge is easier to trust when you know who would be charging it.

Curaçao's parks are run by CARMABI, a non-profit foundation on the island established in 1955, which describes itself as working across marine and terrestrial research, park management, education and consultancy, and which oversees five national parks, Christoffel, Shete Boka, the Curaçao Rif Mangrove Park, the Curaçao Marine Park and Seru Largu.

Its own site describes the marine park's purpose, “Conserving the island's vibrant coral reefs and supporting scientific research for coral restoration”, and states no visitor or diver fee for it. That is an absence rather than a declaration, and it is reported here as one: what can be said is that the body that manages the park publishes no fee, while Bonaire's publishes one. For a diver comparing two weeks on each island, that is the difference between a fixed line in the budget and no line at all.

Bonaire or Curaçao: which to pick

Bonaire if you want to dive from the shore on your own schedule, and you accept a fee for the privilege of a marine park that has been managed since 1979. Curaçao if you want more centres to choose from, want to check an affiliation at the source before you book, and would rather not pay to get in the water.

What neither list supports is a claim that one island's operators are better run than the other's. Nobody has looked.