Coral Gardens - Soufrière & the Pitons - Southwest Coast, Saint Lucia

Site Overview

The Coral Gardens are the south coast's easy, sunlit nursery - a sprawling shallow reef at the foot of Gros Piton where the island's protected marine area grows its next generation of coral and fish in a few warm, clear metres of water. Where the Piton walls overwhelm with depth and blue, this garden overwhelms with density and colour: finger and pillar corals crowd the slope in pale thickets, low bommies hang with goldring butterflyfish and sergeant majors, giant anemones wave their tentacles over clownfish, and clouds of juvenile parrotfish and angelfish school between the heads in the shallows. Turtles cruise the garden for the regular graze, morays and spiny lobster live under the bommies, and the whole scene is bright enough that a snorkeller and a scuba diver see nearly the same reef. Because the depth tops out around 18 metres with no drop-off and barely any current, the Coral Gardens are one of the most reliable beginner and second-dive sites in the marine area - the afternoon dive when the wind lifts, the training profile, and the gentle close to a day of bigger walls. It is not the most dramatic site on the southwest coast, and it does not pretend to be; it is the one that lets a nervous new diver finish a happy dive in ten metres of living colour.