Pemuteran Diving: Menjangan’s National Park Ticket, the Biorock Reef and the Provincial Park Next Door

Pemuteran diving crosses from a provincial marine park into a national park

Pemuteran is a village on the northwest coast of Bali, in Buleleng regency. The diving here runs under two separate sets of rules, and which one applies depends on where the boat stops.

The water in front of the village lies in a marine conservation area that the Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries designated in 2023 and handed to the Bali provincial government to manage. Menjangan Island, to the west, is part of Taman Nasional Bali Barat, West Bali National Park, on the forestry side of government. Its 2024 tariff regulation still carries the name of the old Ministry of Environment and Forestry; the 2025 regulation that sorts parks into ticket classes was signed by the Minister of Forestry.

The park is the older of the two. A 2015 study of its marine zoning dates it to 1984 and its definitive designation to Minister of Forestry Decree 493/Kpts-II/1995, which joined the Bali Barat wildlife reserve, the Pulau Menjangan wildlife reserve “and its surroundings (sea)” and the Bali Barat protection forest. At that point 3,415 hectares of the park were sea. The park office places Menjangan under its Section III at Labuan Lalang.

The east coast is a different trip, covered in the Amed guide, and so is the crossing to Nusa Penida in the Sanur guide. The Biorock growth measurement from Pemuteran reported in a 2022 review is set out in the Gili Trawangan diving guide, next to that island’s own frames.

Pemuteran’s water is Area I of the 2023 Buleleng decree, with no core zone

Minister of Marine Affairs and Fisheries Decree 122 of 2023, set on 31 July 2023 and in force the same day, designates the Kawasan Konservasi di Perairan di Wilayah Buleleng Provinsi Bali, the conservation area in the waters of Buleleng, and orders it managed as a Taman di Perairan, a park in the waters, of 18,060.18 hectares. The ministry’s legal database lists it as in force.

The decree splits that into three areas. Area I is “perairan sekitar Pemuteran”, the waters around Pemuteran: 1,646.07 hectares, of which 1,551.36 are limited-use zone, 47.55 a port and mooring zone and 47.16 a religious and cultural site zone. Area II, off Buleleng Banjar, covers 6,941.63 hectares, and Area III, off Tejakula, 9,472.48 hectares.

What Area I lacks is a core zone. The decree’s only two lie further east along the north coast: 61.21 hectares in Area II and 287.53 hectares in Area III, which also holds a 64.14-hectare rehabilitation zone. Around Pemuteran, every hectare is either limited-use water or water set aside for moorings and a religious site.

The fifth clause appoints the provincial government of Bali to manage the park, and the annex draws Area I and its zones from 41 numbered coordinate points spanning roughly 114°38′ to 114°43′ east. The decree names the areas and zones. It does not mention the village’s own fishing rules or the Biorock project.

That changes an older description. The UNDP Equator Initiative’s record of the village’s reef foundation speaks of “a de facto locally managed marine protected area”. Since July 2023 the waters around Pemuteran have also been a state-designated conservation area with a zoning map, which is the version to plan around.

Where Pemuteran’s 2023 zones let you dive, and the zone off Pura Pulaki

The decree draws the zones; the rules for each come from Regulation 31 of 2020 on managing conservation areas, which the decree cites as its basis. Its annex tabulates activities zone by zone. For a park, kegiatan pariwisata alam perairan, nature tourism in the water, reads: core zone “Tidak Diperbolehkan”, not permitted; limited-use zone “Diperbolehkan dengan Syarat”, permitted with conditions; other zones, not permitted.

The conditions are specific. Water tourism takes place in the tourism subzone of the limited-use zone, at the locations designated for each activity, with the required permit, with safety equipment suited to the activity and by people with the ability it demands. It must be “didampingi oleh pemandu wisata lokal atau pengelola Kawasan Konservasi”, accompanied by a local tour guide or the area’s manager, and visitor numbers may not exceed the area’s carrying capacity.

The religious and cultural site zone is one of the other zones, so the same row of the table closes it to water tourism. On the decree’s coordinates it is a strip of 47.16 hectares whose landward edge runs along the shore directly in front of Pura Pulaki, the coastal temple just east of Pemuteran in Banyupoh. That placement is our reading of the decree’s points against the temple’s mapped position; the decree itself names no temple.

The port and mooring zone, 47.55 hectares, is the other closed block, a four-cornered piece of water off the village between 114°39′40″ and 114°40′12″ east. The decree gives coordinates, not buoys, so ask the operator where the lines run before a shore or boat dive near either zone.

A Menjangan day from Pemuteran: the class 2 ticket and the scuba levy

National park tickets are set by Government Regulation 36 of 2024 on non-tax state revenue at the Ministry of Environment and Forestry, signed and promulgated on 30 September 2024 and in force 30 days later. It revoked Government Regulation 12 of 2014, which had priced park entry before. Its Article 5 says visitor tickets for national parks differ “berdasarkan kelas”, by class, and leaves the classes to a ministerial regulation.

That regulation is Minister of Forestry Regulation 17 of 2025, signed on 10 September 2025 and in force 30 days after promulgation. Its second annex puts Taman Nasional Bali Barat in class 2 and lists seven entry points: Gilimanuk (Karang Sewu), Tegal Bunder, Labuan Lalang, Teluk Terima, Sumberkima, Banyumandi and Pulau Menjangan. Pemuteran is not one of them.

The 2024 annex prices class 2 at Rp200,000 per foreign visitor per day, Rp20,000 per Indonesian visitor and Rp10,000 per student in a group of at least five. Class 1, where Komodo sits, is Rp250,000 for a foreign visitor, and class 3 is Rp150,000. A holiday rate of 150 percent applies to Indonesian visitors and student groups, not to foreign ones.

Diving is a separate line. Under the heading for nature-tourism levies outside areas held under a PB-PSWA, a nature-tourism facility business license, the annex charges Rp25,000 per person per day for “Menyelam (Scuba Diving)”. Boats pay their own ticket: Rp100,000 per unit per day for a motorboat of 40 to 100 horsepower, Rp150,000 from 101 to 500 and Rp200,000 above that.

For a foreign diver that is Rp200,000 before the scuba levy and before any share of the boat’s ticket. Whether the Rp25,000 applies to a given dive depends on whether the site lies inside a licensed concession, which the operator or the park office can answer. The 2025 regulation also lets a park’s class be changed by ministerial decree after an evaluation, so read the ticket you are given.

The provincial ticket Bali’s 2024 levy law sets for water like Pemuteran’s

The provincial side has a price list of its own. Bali Provincial Regulation 1 of 2024 on regional taxes and levies, set and promulgated on 5 January 2024, carries in its annex a table headed “Kawasan Konservasi Provinsi Bali”, conservation areas of the Province of Bali, among its recreation-site services.

Its entry ticket for nature tourism in the water is Rp100,000 per foreign visitor per day and Rp10,000 per domestic visitor, or Rp500,000 and Rp50,000 for a year. Equipment brought in is charged per unit per day: Rp15,000 for a scuba set, Rp10,000 for a snorkeling set, Rp20,000 for an underwater camera and Rp35,000 for underwater video. A tourist boat for fewer than 50 passengers is Rp2,000,000 a day.

Those figures match, line for line, the category B tariff that Government Regulation 85 of 2021 sets for the fisheries ministry’s own conservation areas, the same schedule the Gili Trawangan guide works through for the Gilis. So the provincial day ticket is half the national park’s class 2 ticket at Menjangan.

What the table does not settle is whether a Pemuteran dive is charged today. In September 2026 the head of the provincial fisheries agency told Bali Post that the levy at Nusa Penida, a provincial area, has run since 2023 and applies to activities such as snorkeling. In May 2026 the provincial parliament, passing an amendment to the 2024 regulation, listed Pemuteran among the marine tourism areas whose levy potential still needed to be optimized. That amendment may have changed the table.

Menjangan’s marine zoning and the 2002 dive code for Pemuteran boats

Mahmud, Satria and Kinseng (2015) read the park’s zoning through four versions, from 1987 to 2010. Their table for the 2010 zoning, set by the forestry director general’s Decree 143 of 2010, gives the sea 455.370 hectares of core zone, 221.741 of marine protection zone, 2,417.011 of utilization zone and 310.943 of traditional zone for fishers, the last split between Teluk Terima and Teluk Gilimanuk.

The park’s own visitor page says the main location tourists visit is the utilization zone on Pulau Menjangan, for snorkeling and diving, at eight points around the island. The same page names two official entry points set by a director general’s decree, Labuan Lalang and Banyuwedang, and lists Pemuteran among the other departure points for the island.

The 2015 study adds a detail that matters on a drift. At the time of the research the marine zone boundaries were not marked in the field: the lines were clear on the map, the authors write, but there were no markers on the water, which blurred where use was permitted and where it was not.

The rules a diver meets most directly come from a code of conduct, Decree 513/IV-BTNBB/2002 of the park head, dated 29 April 2002, for the waters of Menjangan and around it. No rubbish, no walking on or touching coral, no damaging or taking marine life, no fishing within about 500 meters of Menjangan’s shore in the diving area, no fish feeding and no dropping anchor.

Enforcement is stepped. An offender gets a first, second and third warning, after which the park stops providing administrative services to them, and the code states that its sanctions do not replace criminal penalties. The code dates from 2002 and was reported in 2015, so ask at Labuan Lalang whether a newer version applies.

Pemuteran’s Biorock reef: the 2012 Equator Prize and the record behind it

The Biorock project is why many people know the village. The UNDP Equator Initiative lists Yayasan Kerang Lestari Teluk Pemuteran, the Pemuteran Bay Coral Protection Foundation, as an Equator Prize winner in 2012, founded in 2000, and says it “oversees more than 70 artificial ‘biorock’ coral reefs”. Its 2013 case study adds that the first structure went in during 2000 with money from a local hotel, and that the structures run to half a kilometer in total over about two hectares.

Two details in that record are worth knowing. The UN spells the name Kerang, which in Indonesian means shellfish; the foundation is usually written Karang Lestari, karang being coral, which is how the 2017 study below spells it. And the case study makes two different growth claims, corals growing two to six times faster on one page and three to five times faster two pages later. Neither is a measurement.

A peer-reviewed study gives the layout on the ground. Trialfhianty and Suadi (2017) place the restoration work in Banjar Loka Segara, in northwest Pemuteran, across four areas: the first and largest, 1.5 hectares, managed by the Karang Lestari Foundation, the second and third by Reef Seen Diving Centre and the fourth by Adi Asri Resort.

Thomas Goreau, who developed the method with the late Wolf Hilbertz, writes in his 2022 review that the Pemuteran project started two years after almost all the corals there had bleached and died in 1998. He also writes that fish densities are visibly higher on Biorock than around it, “but few measurements have been made”.

Pemuteran’s Biorock and Menjangan in the June 2016 bleaching survey

A set of measurements comes from Subhan and twelve co-authors (2024), who surveyed the Biorock area and Menjangan in June 2016, during a bleaching event, with point intercept transects and underwater visual census. Dead coral with algae dominated both: 48.9 percent at Biorock Pemuteran and 51 percent at Menjangan. Both fell in the poor category for coral condition, 0 to 24.9 percent.

The fish were a different picture. The team counted 11,260 fish of 120 species; abundance was 1,326 ± 224 per 250 square meters at Menjangan against 551 ± 235 at Biorock Pemuteran, and the authors describe both communities as stable, with low dominance and moderate to high diversity. Trialfhianty, whose 2017 study appears above, is among the authors.

A longer record exists for the park. Suparno and colleagues (2019), in Atoll Research Bulletin 620, followed fish and stony coral inside and outside Bali Barat National Park from 2011 to 2016, including Menjangan, which they call its most popular dive site. They name the stressors seen there for decades: destructive fishing, elevated water temperatures and “damage from anchors and careless visitors”.

For a diver the lesson is plain rather than dramatic. Neither site was spared in 2016, and anchors sit on the published list of causes, which is exactly what the 2002 code bans. Buoyancy near the reef is the part of that list you control.

Who enforces Pemuteran’s fishing rules: the Pecalang Laut

Before the state zoning, the village’s protection was its own. The UNDP case study describes village rules against destructive fishing that had been declared earlier but poorly enforced, and that were revived with a community patrol, the pecalang laut, a village police that watches the protected water. Offenders are warned first; repeat offenders, it says, have their boats and fishing gear seized and are arrested and punished by the Indonesian police.

Trialfhianty and Suadi interviewed 116 people in April and May 2016, among them 10 Pecalang Laut, 20 fishers, 11 people working in dive centers, 20 in tourism, 10 farmers and 38 tourists, alongside key informants. About 56 percent of the community had taken part in the project, and the Pecalang Laut, dive instructors and fishers were the most involved. Fishers told them the reef’s decline began around 1980, with bombs and cyanide.

The same study records that the growing tourism industry on the beach “and traditional rules limited the fishing area”, and that many fishers moved into guiding, dive centers and hotels. Neither source reproduces the text of the village’s customary rule, so its terms here are as the two sources describe them.

Pemuteran divers and the hyperbaric clinic in Denpasar

The hyperbaric chamber that Bali’s central state hospital publishes is at RSUP Prof. dr. I.G.N.G. Ngoerah on Jalan Diponegoro, Denpasar 80113, which its own page still calls Sanglah; switchboard (0361) 227911. The page lists the hyperbaric polyclinic as open Monday to Friday except holidays, with registration from 07:00 to 13:30 Monday to Thursday and 07:00 to 13:00 on Friday.

Denpasar is on the far side of the island from Pemuteran. A clinic with registration hours is not the same thing as round-the-clock emergency recompression, so ask the operator for its evacuation plan before the first dive, and check that your dive insurance pays for evacuation and chamber treatment. The Sanur guide describes who that clinic treats.

Eight dive businesses on the Pemuteran list, two assessed in person

The Pemuteran operator list holds 8 dive businesses. Six are published by SSI in its register of affiliated centers, read on 13 September 2026. Two are Green Fins members assessed in person within the last 12 months, read on 14 August 2026: Abyss Ocean World as a Certified Gold Member and Easy Divers Bali as a Certified Silver Member. All eight publish a website.

SSI’s town field files two of the six under Singaraja and one under Banyuwedang, where the park’s Banyumandi entry point is; a filing town is not always where the boats leave. SSI rates that one for Freediving, Extended Range and Rebreather, which describes the listing rather than a course running this season.

Neither register records whether an operator is licensed for the park or the provincial area, which is what decides the boat ticket and the levy above, so ask. Which registers can be read sets out what each source can and cannot prove.