Ibiza Diving: Four Marine Reserves, the Gorgonian Walls of Es Vedrà and a Wreck in 45 Meters of Water

Scuba in Ibiza’s four marine reserves needs a Balearic authorization, snorkeling does not

Four of the Balearic Government’s marine reserves touch Ibiza. The oldest, the reserve of es Freus d’Eivissa i Formentera, fills the strait between the two islands and was established on 28 May 1999, the first of the Balearic network. The reserve of the northeast coast of Ibiza and Tagomago followed in December 2018, and the reserves of ses Bledes and es Vedrà-Vedranell off the west coast in May 2023.

One rule runs through all four. Article 9 of Decreto 41/2015 says that scuba diving in the reserves needs a specific authorization from the fisheries directorate, issued to an individual or, only for dive centers and dive clubs, collectively, for a year or a shorter period. Divers may not carry anything that could be used to fish or take marine life, in hand or on their boat, and their dives have to be reported to the directorate.

Breath-hold diving is treated differently. Article 9.7 says snorkeling in the reserves needs no prior authorization, although each reserve may regulate it by resolution. The Govern’s own pages for the Freus and for the two west-coast reserves put it in one line: breath-hold dives are free throughout the reserve, and a safety knife is the one exception to the ban on carrying fishing tools.

On a guided dive the center’s collective authorization covers you. How the authorization is issued, and the skills test a newcomer to the Balearic reserves can be asked to pass, are set out in our Mallorca diving guide, together with the Balearic diving decree and Spain’s national safety rules, which apply on Ibiza in the same way.

Ibiza’s 2023 reserves at ses Bledes and es Vedrà protect red gorgonians and ban individual night dives

Decreto 25/2023 of 2 May 2023, published in the Balearic gazette on 4 May, created two reserves off Ibiza’s west coast, and its preamble names the reason. The red gorgonian, Paramuricea clavata, is a vulnerable species of high heritage value, and some of the few Balearic populations that grow on submerged vertical walls lie inside the new limits. A study of the west coast had also found the fish stocks around both island groups badly damaged.

The Govern gives the sizes. The ses Bledes reserve covers 448 hectares, of which 26 form a special protection zone around na Bosc, na Vaixell and na Gorra. The es Vedrà-Vedranell reserve covers about 536 hectares, with a special protection zone of 2 hectares at the Punta de na Bruta. Both overlap the natural reserves of es Vedrà, es Vedranell and the Illots de Ponent, declared in 2002, and the Costa Oest d’Eivissa conservation area of 2022.

Neither special zone is closed to divers. At ses Bledes, article 2 bans all fishing and extraction except professional hand lines, squid jigs and trolling, plus management and science. At na Bruta, article 3 bans only the setting of trammel nets. Everywhere else in both reserves, fishing and extraction are banned apart from small-scale professional fishing and recreational fishing from boats, both under license, sampling, and since 2024 no-kill competitions tied to the reserve’s monitoring. Recreational fishing from the islets themselves is banned.

Article 7 adds the rule a diver meets. Scuba and breath-hold diving follow article 9 of Decreto 41/2015, and night dives are prohibited for individual scuba diving, the category the reserve rules set against a center’s or club’s collective authorization. A night dive here goes through a center or club, not an individual authorization.

The decree also looks ahead. Article 7.4 tells the fisheries department to promote a study of scuba activity and then, where appropriate, to set by order dive points marked by mooring buoys with an ecological fixing, diver quotas and schedules. A 2024 amendment, Decreto 45/2024, rewrote the fishing exceptions of both reserves and left the diving article as it was.

The Freus reserve between Ibiza and Formentera bans scuba in one box of water off s’Espardell

The Freus reserve is the older design, and its founding decree still carries the sentence that matters most to a diver. Article 2 of Decreto 63/1999 declared a maximum protection zone around the islet of s’Espardell, off the north of Formentera, and banned in it any fishing, the taking of marine flora and fauna, anchoring and scuba diving. Only dives and sampling for science can be authorized there.

Decreto 41/2015 redrew the limits of the reserve and of the zone and repealed other parts of the 1999 decree, but not article 2. The zone now runs from the Racó de sa Casota to the Punta de Migjorn, a box between about 38°47.3’ and 38°48.6’ N and 1°27.8’ and 1°29.5’ E, closed along the islet’s shore. The Govern’s page for the reserve, as archived in April 2026, says scuba is allowed everywhere in the Freus except there.

Read the rule as it is written. It names scuba, buceo con escafandra autónoma, and the same Govern page says breath-hold dives are free throughout the reserve, without carving the Espardell zone out of that. The ban on anchoring, by contrast, applies to every boat. The islets of Espardell and Espardelló are protected on land too: Ley 17/2001 declared them a natural reserve inside the Ses Salines natural park.

The 1999 preamble explains why the strait was chosen. It describes large meadows of Posidonia oceanica and Cymodocea nodosa as nurseries for commercial fish, and it records an initiative by the town of Eivissa and other Pitiusan institutions to have the Posidonia meadows of the area declared World Heritage. UNESCO inscribed them later that year.

Tagomago, off Ibiza’s northeast coast, has an integral zone where boats may not anchor

Decreto 45/2018 of 14 December 2018 created the reserve of the northeast coast of Ibiza and Tagomago, from the shore at Santa Eulària round to the Punta des Jonc and the waters around the islet of Tagomago. Its preamble is unusually frank about why. A study presented by the Consell d’Eivissa found experimental catches there significantly lower than in the Freus reserve, in places with similar conditions.

The fish counts in the same study showed large coastal predators missing, or scarce and small: the dusky grouper, the common dentex, even the red scorpionfish, in water that suits them. The one bright spot was the greater amberjack, Seriola dumerili, for which Tagomago appeared to be an important place. The preamble lists the reefs as well, the Llosas of Santa Eulària and es Figueral that break the surface and the reefs of Cala Mestella and Cala Jonc that do not.

Article 2 declares an integral reserve around the Llosa des Figueral, which the Govern puts at about 220 hectares; the study had proposed 250. Article 3.3 bans anchoring in it, on top of the limits that article 8.4 of the Balearic fisheries law, Ley 6/2013, attaches to integral zones, which can cover underwater activities as well as fishing. The directorate may authorize anchoring, a dive or sampling there only for scientific, safety or rescue reasons.

In the rest of the reserve, scuba follows article 9 of Decreto 41/2015. Article 6.2 adds a second layer: diving in the parts that fall inside Natura 2000 sites, among them the Tagomago site, the marine area of Tagomago and the islets of Santa Eulària, Redona and es Canar, must also comply with those sites’ management plans. The 2024 amendment changed the fishing exceptions here too, and not the diving article.

The Posidonia between Ibiza and Formentera is not shown to be 100,000 years old

The line most visitors meet about the seagrass off Ibiza is that one plant here is 100,000 years old, the oldest living thing on Earth. That is how SINC, the Spanish public science news agency, reported the study on 2 February 2012: a CSIC team had found a clone of Posidonia oceanica in Formentera, 100,000 years old, making it the longest-lived species in the biosphere.

The paper, published in PLoS ONE on 1 February 2012, says something narrower. The team genotyped 1,544 sampling units from 40 locations across the Mediterranean and found identical genotypes in meadows up to 15 kilometers apart. In Formentera, 18 to 30 percent of the sampled shoots belonged to genets found at two localities 15 kilometers apart around a cape, and a second pair of meadows sharing clones lay 7 kilometers apart, between Formentera and Ibiza.

Then comes the age. If those clones had spread by growth alone, the authors calculate a minimum age of 80,000 to 200,000 years. In the next sentence they call that scenario unlikely, because during the last ice age the sea stood about 100 meters lower and the sampling sites would have been dry land. Their preferred model combines clonal growth with shoots breaking off and re-rooting nearby, and it implies a less extreme life span.

So the version the paper supports is this: the meadows you drift over between Ibiza and Formentera hold clones spread across kilometers, which the abstract puts at hundreds to thousands of years old and the discussion at thousands to tens of thousands. The PLOS press release of 1 February used that second range. The popular 100,000 years comes from a scenario the paper itself sets aside.

Ibiza’s World Heritage site is mostly sea, and dive boats may not anchor on its meadows

UNESCO inscribed Ibiza, Biodiversity and Culture in 1999 as a mixed property: the fortified upper town, the Phoenician settlement of Sa Caleta, the necropolis of Puig des Molins, and the sea. Its statement says the property covers 9,020 hectares, mostly sea, and that its natural values are characterized by the best-conserved meadows of Posidonia oceanica in the Mediterranean.

The natural criteria go further than the seagrass. Criterion (ix) names dense Posidonia meadows and reefs of cushion coral, and criterion (x) calls the property home to the most diverse community of Mediterranean pillow coral in the Mediterranean. The statement also lists what protection requires: mooring points, signposted free-anchoring zones, surveillance of the marine reserves, and monitoring and removal of invasive seaweed.

UNESCO rests the legal protection of those natural values on a national law of 1995 and on Ley 17/2001, the Balearic law that made Ses Salines a natural park. The Govern puts the park at about 2,752.5 hectares of land and 14,028 hectares of sea, from the south of Ibiza to the north of Formentera, including the arm of sea between them. The Freus reserve lies in that same strait, so a dive boat there works under a fisheries reserve and a natural park at once.

A third applies across the islands. Decreto 25/2018 on Posidonia bans anchoring on the meadows as a general rule in article 7.1, and its preamble names the meadows between Eivissa and Formentera as the ones UNESCO listed. Article 2.1.f defines a professional anchorage and names dive companies as its example; article 8.3.f requires boats that need one over Posidonia to use permanent low-impact moorings.

Divers are named directly as well. Article 13.2 lists pulling up bundles of Posidonia during dives among the acts that count as offenses under Spain’s biodiversity law, where they degrade or destroy the habitat. The court challenge that trimmed other parts of the decree in 2021 is covered in the Mallorca guide; the general anchoring ban in article 7.1 survived it.

The Don Pedro wreck off Ibiza lies in 45 meters, past Spain’s 40-meter scuba limit

In the early hours of 11 July 2007 the Spanish ro-ro ship Don Pedro left Ibiza for Valencia. At 02:52, shortly after clearing the harbor mouth, it struck the shoals next to the Dado Pequeño, one of the islets called Los Dados, and water came in through the port side. The 18 crew and 2 passengers were all rescued, and the ship sank at about 04:04.

The official investigation report, by Spain’s standing commission for maritime accident investigation, puts the wreck at 38°53.08’ N, 1°27.11’ E, 1.15 miles on a bearing of 169 degrees from the end of the Botafoch breakwater. It came to rest on its port side in 45 meters of water. The ship was 141.55 meters long with a beam of 18.67 meters, so, lying on its side, the hull must rise well above that bottom.

Depth is where the national rules come in. Article 18.1 of Real Decreto 550/2020, in the consolidated text in force since 31 December 2025, limits recreational scuba to 40 meters on air or nitrox, with no planned decompression. Article 18.3 is the exception: going beyond those depth and gas limits is open only to divers over 18, carrying the minimum equipment in section 1.2 of annex III.

Article 18.1 also rules out entering wreck interiors, caves or any overhead dive where light is lost and the penetration depth is more than 30 meters. Which parts of the Don Pedro fall inside 40 meters is a question for the dive plan, not for this page. For wrecks elsewhere, see the wreck diving list.

The islets the ship hit are protected in their own right: Ley 17/2001 declared es Daus, the Dau Gros and Dau Petit, a natural reserve inside the Ses Salines park. The report’s appendix records a large oil slick near the sinking position that morning, and the harbor master of Ibiza activated Spain’s national contingency plan for accidental marine pollution at 09:00.

Ibiza dive centers need a Govern authorization, and seven are in the directory

A dive center on Ibiza cannot simply open. Article 13 of Decreto 14/2014, as amended on 1 September 2026, requires prior authorization from the Balearic fisheries directorate. The application form annexed to the decree asks for a dive plan with procedures for recovering, resuscitating and evacuating an injured diver, emergency oxygen, and information on the nearest hyperbaric medicine center. Ask for that plan before you book.

The Ibiza operator list holds seven dive businesses, compiled on 21 September 2026. Six are published by SSI in its register of affiliated centers, and one is a Green Fins digital member, a status based on self-evaluation rather than an in-person assessment. All seven publish a website. Two are filed under Formentera, at La Savina and Formentera, and one under Sant Josep de sa Talaia.

SSI rates two of the six for Extended Range and one of those for Mermaid, a statement about the listing and not proof that a course runs this season. None of these registers is the Govern’s authorization, and which registers can be read sets out what each source can and cannot tell you. For a longer stay, the Spain digital nomad visa guide covers the residence side, and the dive insurance guide covers the accident insurance, including hyperbaric treatment, that the Balearic decree asks every recreational diver to hold.