Fairyland - Soufrière & the Pitons - Southwest Coast, Saint Lucia

Site Overview

Fairyland earns its name the way most good things in the south coast do: it should not be this rich, this shallow and this easy. Inside the Soufriere Marine Management Area a few minutes by boat from Soufriere, the reef builds into towers and bommies of hard coral wrapped in plumes of soft coral and sea fans, holding a fish population so dense that divers describe the site as a floating aquarium with better interior design. Nutrient-rich water upwelling along the southwest feeds the whole system - the corals are fat, the plankton hangs in visible clouds off the ledges, and the grunts, snapper, jacks and drum that live off it grow bold in the presence of a motionless diver. The depth caps out around 18 metres, which makes this one of the rare south-coast sites where an Open Water diver sees the full show without a computer beeping, and where a guide with a torch can turn an ordinary reef dive into a theatre of colour. Octopus dens, moray holes and camouflaged flounders run along the base of the bommies for macro eyes, and the reef is a known octopus nursery - patient divers in the right season count breeding clusters on the ledges. For most visiting divers it is the first boat dive of the trip and instantly resets their expectations of what Caribbean reef diving can be.