Costa Brava Diving: Nobody Checked These 5 Operators, but Catalonia Checks Something Else

What the register does not tell you here

Green Fins has three certified tiers awarded on an in-person assessment, and a fourth status, Digital Member, for businesses that have registered without one. On 2026-08-14 all 5 Costa Brava members in the register held that fourth status.

So the honest summary of what an independent source confirms about diving here is: these businesses exist and signed up. That is worth something, and it is a great deal less than the same page means for Puerto Galera, where sixteen of sixteen were assessed in person within the year. We would rather draw that line clearly than let one badge stand in for two very different things.

The check that does exist, and it is stiffer

The Illes Medes sit about a kilometre off L'Estartit inside the Parc Natural del Montgrí, les Illes Medes i el Baix Ter, and the strictly protected zone is not open water you can simply take a boat into. The Generalitat de Catalunya requires diving centres to hold an authorisation to run scuba activities there, and states it plainly: “Els centres d'immersió han d'obtenir l'autorització de l'Administració per a poder gestionar activitats d'immersió amb escafandre autònom”.

The authorisation is granted by the Departament de Territori, Habitatge i Transició Ecològica, through its Direcció General de Polítiques Ambientals i Medi Natural, and it runs for two calendar years from the January after it is granted. It applies to the business, not to an individual instructor.

This is a stronger signal than anything on our operator list for this location, and it is invisible to us: we could not find the roll of authorised centres published in a form we could read. The requirement is documented on the government's own procedure page; who currently satisfies it is not something we can show you. So the useful thing we can do is tell you the question exists. Ask to see the authorisation.

What to ask instead of looking at a badge

What to ask instead. A Digital Member listing tells you a business filled in a form. These are better questions, and any decent operator will answer them without fuss: how many divers per guide; whether the guide is in the water with you or on the boat; what happens if you use air faster than the group; and whether they will show you the certificate for whatever they claim to hold. An operator that gets defensive about the fourth one has answered it.

What we did not verify

Dive fees, park access charges, boat schedules, the annual cap on dives per zone and the seasonal pattern are hard facts under our rules and we did not confirm them at a primary source. They are absent rather than guessed at.