Curacao Diving: Shore Dives, Season and the Marine Park

Diving from the beach

The shore-diving list the tourist board publishes runs to ten named entries and it puts the island's total at more than 38 sites you can walk into. Playa Lagun, Cas Abao and Kokomo Beach are the shallow, calm ends of it, with reef starting a few metres out. Playa Piskado aside, the point is that none of these needs a boat booking.

Alice in Wonderland at Playa Kalki is the one named first, coral garden with turtles and rays, and the reef drops away from roughly 9 to 30 m. Porto Mari has a double reef, two ridges with a sand channel between them. Blue Bay Wall is the vertical one and the board marks it as the more advanced dive.

That changes what a week costs and how it runs. Boat trips are for the sites that need them, not for every dive, and a shore-diving island rewards a car more than it rewards a package.

The Tugboat and the Superior Producer

The Tugboat is the postcard: a small wreck sitting in about 5 m in a sheltered bay, shallow enough that snorkellers see it and open-water divers can spend a whole tank on it. Barracuda, parrotfish and angelfish over an artificial reef that grew on a boat.

The Superior Producer is the opposite dive and the reason to keep building experience. A 50 m cargo ship that went down in 1977, upright at around 30 m, coral-covered, with current that operators warn about. It is an experienced-diver site and the depth alone puts it outside an open-water certificate.

Both are shore entries. That is unusual for a wreck at thirty metres and it is the sort of thing that decides where somebody spends a week.

When to go to Curaçao, and what the water does through the year

The Meteorological Department of Curacao puts sea temperatures at about 27 °C on average, coldest around February and March at about 25.9 °C and warmest around September and October at about 28.2 °C. A 3 mm suit covers the range for most people.

The dry season runs February through May and the rainy season October to January, on the same department's figures. Rain here is squalls rather than a monsoon, and it does not close the diving.

The bigger point for anyone planning around the Caribbean calendar: the department describes the Dutch Leewards as sitting on the southern edge of the Atlantic hurricane region, which makes direct impacts “relatively rare compared to islands farther north”. Rare is not never, and it is not a forecast, but it is why the island dives in September when much of the Caribbean does not.

What it costs to get in the water

Nothing, at the water's edge. CARMABI's own marine park page sets out no fee, no permit and no nature tag for divers or snorkellers. Neighbouring Bonaire runs a nature fee that every diver pays; Curacao, on the manager's own published page, does not.

A levy on nature use was drafted for Curacao in 2023 and reported at 100 guilders. It is not on CARMABI's page and not something to budget for, but it is the kind of thing that changes between one season and the next, so it is worth a look before a long trip.

The marine park, and the limit of what it tells you

The park is run by the CARMABI Foundation, a non-profit founded in 1955, and covers in its own words “over 10,000 hectares of pristine marine habitats” along the southern coast: which is the coast every site above sits on.

It protects habitat. It does not license dive shops, and its own page states no rules for operators, so a business working inside the park has not been checked by the park. The Green Fins register, read between 2026-08-14 and 2026-09-21, carried 7 members in Curaçao, and none of the 7 has been assessed in person: all are Digital Members, which means registered and never visited. The tier column on the operator list is therefore the same for every one of them and carries no information.

Of the operator sites, 22 of the 25 responded. Training agencies named on the pages that did: PADI on 4 and SSI on 1. Not one of the 25 publishes which languages their instructors teach in. What to ask instead of looking for a badge: how many divers per guide, what the plan is if a current picks up on the Superior Producer, and whether the shop rents tanks for unguided shore dives.