Snorkeling vs Diving in Aruba

Snorkeling vs diving in Aruba comes down to one wreck. For most of the island the difference is smaller than you would expect.

Why snorkeling holds up well here

Aruba’s shore reef is shallow. At Boca Catalina the coral sits one and a half to two metres down, and at Mangel Halto the good structure runs from half a metre to eight.

So the turtles, the parrotfish, the angelfish and the eagle rays are all within snorkeling range. You are not missing them by staying on the surface.

Snorkeling is also free, needs no certification, and lets you do a different reef every morning without booking anything.

Where diving wins

The Antilla. She is a 122-metre German cargo ship scuttled on 10 May 1940, sitting in 18 to 27 metres of water off Malmok Beach, and she is the largest accessible wreck in the Caribbean.

In clear conditions a snorkeler can see the top of her superstructure from four or five metres down. A diver gets the holds, the plating and eighty-five years of coral growth.

That is a genuinely different experience, and it is the one case where the certification pays for itself.

The middle option

A guided boat snorkel trip over the Antilla gets you closer than the shore ever will. The snorkeling tours that go there are the sensible compromise.

What to do

If you have three days, snorkel the shore sites and take one boat trip. If the wreck is why you came, dive it — and snorkel everything else.