I am writing this from Sabang, on the north coast of Mindoro, between dives. The reefs are the healthiest I have ever seen, and the place gathers divers in the know from all around the world for exactly that reason.
I realised it as soon as I descended on my very first dive: I was looking at the most dense and colourful coral reef I had ever seen. The reef was so dense I could not find a single bare patch of substrate. Not one. Soft coral piled on top of hard coral piled on top of more soft coral, in colours and textures stacked like a city seen from above. I have dived many renowned diving destinations around the world. I had not seen a reef do this before.
That dive was the moment I understood why people who have travelled with their fins on for thirty years keep coming back to one specific bay on the north coast of Mindoro. Puerto Galera is a reef destination, in the strict and unfashionable sense of the word, and the reefs are the healthiest I have ever seen. It is particularly well known among tech divers, but it is also a brilliant destination for recreational divers of every level.
Why the Reef Is Like This
Puerto Galera sits inside the Verde Island Passage, the narrow body of water that separates Luzon from Mindoro. In 2005, Kent Carpenter and Victor Springer published the paper that confirmed what marine biologists working in the region had long suspected. The passage holds the highest concentration of coastal marine species per unit area anywhere on the planet. The “centre of the centre of marine biodiversity,” as their title put it. Higher even than the Coral Triangle as a whole, which itself is the most species-rich marine region on Earth.
The reef at Sabang Point is what that statistic looks like in person. You do not see a sample of species. You see the floor of a system that has had everything in it for so long that there is no room left for anything to be missing.
The Cephalopod Parade
Reef density is the first thing you notice. Cephalopod density is the second. I have lost count of the number of dives in Puerto Galera that delivered an octopus or cuttlefish encounter I would have flown for on its own. Mimic octopus, sliding across sand in the late afternoon, pretending to be a flatfish until it remembers it is meant to be a banded sea krait. Blue-ringed octopus, the size of a thumb, sitting on a coral head with its rings blinking on and off like a warning sign. Wonderpus on the move. And the one that gets me every time, the flamboyant cuttlefish, walking across the sand on its hyponomes with the colours rolling through its skin in waves of hot pink, yellow and dark purple. There is no other animal that looks like this.
Puerto Galera Is Nudibranch Heaven
The abundance of nudibranch life here is unbelievable. New species every dive, in a range you cannot file properly in your head until you have done dozens of dives in the area. Pretty much anything you have seen on a critter ID poster, you can find here, often with the same divemaster or spotter pointing to a handful of them in one small patch of reef. It can be hard to choose which nudibranch to focus on, because they are all stunning. A great thing about this place is that you will easily come across other people with the same obsession, which makes the hunt for nudis a lot more enjoyable.
Most dive shops have their local divemasters trained as macro critter spotters. They are incredibly knowledgeable, and as a macro lover you will learn a lot from them so that eventually you start spotting on your own.
I have to admit that it was the diversity and the quantity of unreal sea slugs that made me decide to spend over six months in the same destination, and until my very last dive I found something new on pretty much every submersion. There are many popular common species, but every so often you will find very rare ones. You never know what you are going to find, and that is part of the magic.
I reinforced my obsession with nudibranchs here, and Puerto Galera is where I started my Finding Nudibranchs series. If that sounds interesting to you, you are welcome to follow along on Instagram, where I share the whimsical world of nudis one encounter at a time.
For underwater macro photographers, the species list reads like a wish list:
- Flamboyant cuttlefish (Metasepia pfefferi)
- Pygmy seahorse (Hippocampus bargibanti)
- Sheep nudibranch (Costasiella sp.)
- Mandarin fish (Synchiropus splendidus)
- Blue-ringed octopus (Hapalochlaena lunulata)
- Peacock mantis shrimp (Odontodactylus scyllarus)
- Rhinopias (Rhinopias frondosa)
- Electric clam (Ctenoides ales)
- Ghost nudibranch (Melibe colemani)
This is one of those destinations where a dedicated macro camera earns its weight. I have shot the same dive sites with three different setups and the macro days are the ones I keep coming back to in the edit.
Sea Turtles
There is a healthy population of sea turtles on the reefs around Puerto Galera, and it makes for a wonderful sight. Encountering green and hawksbill turtles is not rare at all, and if you are lucky you will come across several of them hanging out in the same area. They are usually either eating or sleeping comfortably on top of coral.
Sea turtles carry real significance for this destination, enough that there are projects dedicated to protecting them. Dive Mindoro runs a citizen science programme for marine turtle conservation that asks visiting divers to log their sightings, with photo IDs that feed into a long-running population study. If you dive Puerto Galera, you can contribute by submitting your turtle photographs and dive site notes through the project; it takes very little time and meaningfully expands the dataset they are building.
Special and Rare Encounters
Are there thresher sharks in Puerto Galera?
Yes. I was not expecting to encounter thresher sharks here. When divers seek this species in the Philippines, the destination that immediately comes to mind is Malapascua, on Cebu’s northern tip, where the pre-dawn dive at Monad Shoal is one of the more famous big-animal encounters in Southeast Asia. But in March, the stretch of wall between Sinandigan and Kilima Steps on the eastern side of Sabang Bay starts seeing them, in a window where the site delivers consistent sightings for divers who time it right.
We had five consecutive days of thresher encounters in the same area. Most of the sightings sat between twenty and twenty-five metres, the long-tailed silhouettes moving along the contour of the wall the way threshers move, slow and deliberate, indifferent to the divers floating beside them. A couple of times the animals came inside four metres of me. That close, you can see the stunning, captivating eye. You can see the slow downstroke of the upper lobe of the tail driving the body forward. I feel so lucky to have had such organic encounters with this species.
The one that sticks is the dive where the same animal turned and came back along the wall for a second pass. Threshers do not usually do that. This one did. Then it was gone, into the deeper water beyond the wall, and the next morning we were back at the same site doing the same dive looking for the same animals. They came again.
Thresher sharks prefer deeper water, so tech divers have more of a chance of seeing them at depths recreational divers cannot reach. Not much is known about the sharks in this area, only that for the last couple of years they have been visiting for a brief period and then disappearing.
Are there orcas in Puerto Galera?
On 13 May 2026, a pod of orcas was filmed in the Verde Island Passage off Lubang, Mindoro by Crystal from Coral Reef Safari. The footage went up on Marine Wildlife Watch of the Philippines within hours. Orcas are not Philippine waters animals; they prefer the colder temperate latitudes and only occasionally drop into tropical channels while moving between hunting grounds. Local marine groups treat any orca sighting in the passage as a rare event, the kind that surfaces every several years.
There is no claim to make here other than the obvious one. The passage holds enough density of life that the apex animals occasionally swim through to remind everyone what the system is capable of.
The Dive Sites Around Sabang
Most divers base in Sabang, the small town on the eastern arm of Puerto Galera Bay. From there, almost every site worth doing is five to fifteen minutes off the beach by banca. The proximity is its own gift. You can do a dive, come back to your room, use a real bathroom and a hot shower, eat a proper lunch, and be back on the water two hours later. There is none of the two-tank-trapped-in-the-wetsuit-with-no-options situation that most other dive destinations force on you. We are all adults. We all know what the alternative is. Sabang lets you skip it.
The other gift is the range. There are not many bays in the world where you can do every kind of dive within a half-hour radius of one beach.
The current sites are the headline. The Canyons is the dive that puts Puerto Galera on the more committed divers’ map: three sand bowls strung along a sweeping current line at twenty-five metres, run only when the tide is right and by operators that know what they are doing. West Escarceo runs fast along the reef edge with schooling jacks and barracuda passing close. Hole in the Wall is a literal swim-through cut into the reef, usually paired with a drift past Escarceo Point. Pink Wall is a current-driven wall site east of Sinandigan.
The easy reefs are the other half of the bay. Coral Garden is the introductory site, twelve to eighteen metres, with the densest soft-coral carpet I have ever seen and no current to fight. Kilima Steps is terraced coral on a gentle slope, the kind of dive you do twice on the same morning. LaLaguna Point is the protected reef site for warm-ups and recovery between harder dives. Boulders is exactly what it sounds like, a cluster of large rocks covered in soft coral, easy and beautiful.
The wrecks live in front of the town. Sabang Wreck is actually three small wrecks scattered in the bay, sometimes diveable as a long shore dive straight off the beach. The Alma Jane is a steel hull at eighteen metres, beautifully overgrown after two decades in the water.
The macro and muck diving is where Puerto Galera really separates from its competitors. Sinandigan Wall has the famous wall, but the macro at the top of the wall, at five to ten metres, is just as productive as anything below. Monkey Beach is sand, stunning corals of every kind, and seagrass, with the Monkey Wreck sitting nearby for an easy add-on. Fantasea, on the same coastline as Monkey Beach and Sabang Point, is the kind of sand-and-patch-reef site where the same patient looking pays off. Manila Channel is the tech-diving site of the area, dropping into deeper sections of the channel where recreational depths do not reach.
And then there are the secret sites. Every operator has a different shortlist of unpublished sand patches and rubble corners that the local divemasters built up through years of repeat looking. The wonderpus they found two years ago and have not stopped checking on. The mandarin fish couple that comes out at dusk under the same coral head, every evening, on schedule. The blue-ringed octopus that sits under the same coral head every Wednesday. Ask. The better operators will take you to theirs.
Pelagic chances stack on top of all this. The deeper edges of The Canyons see eagle rays, big schools of trevallies, and bumphead parrotfish if you are lucky. Cat sharks tuck into the same rock formations during the day and come out hunting at night, which makes them a known commodity for the operators who know where to look. The bay itself, on the right day, gets visitors from the open passage.
Practical Notes
Sabang is the practical base for most divers. Resorts and dive shops are stacked along the beach. Asia Divers, Atlantis Dive Resort, Action Divers, Capt’n Gregg’s and Arkipelago are among the operators with the longest local histories, and the quality of guiding is generally high. Equipment hire is normal-priced; bring your own underwater camera if you have one.
The route in: fly to Manila, road transfer to Batangas Pier (two and a half hours on a good day), banca crossing to Sabang (thirty to sixty minutes). Most resorts will arrange the door-to-door package and it makes the journey vastly easier. Four to five hours total is typical.
Open Water certification is plenty for most sites. Advanced helps for the Canyons and gives you the depth allowance to fully use the wall sites at Sinandigan. Dive insurance, as always, is non-negotiable.
Water temperatures sit between 26 and 29 degrees Celsius for most of the year, dropping to around 25 degrees in the winter months of December through February and reaching 29 to 30 degrees in the summer peak between May and August. A 5mm full suit is the standard for the winter months, not just because the water is cooler but because the wind picks up across the open passage and surface intervals between dives get cold fast on a banca. A 3mm full suit covers the shoulder seasons. A 3mm shorty or a 1mm skin is enough in summer.
For best conditions, the dry season from November through May is the most reliable window. June through October is the southwest monsoon, but the northern coast of Mindoro is well sheltered and the diving holds up on most days. March for the threshers. May for the warm water and the chance, this year at least, of having been there when the orcas came through.
A Closing Thought
Puerto Galera is one of the premier diving destinations in the Philippines, with a high concentration of dive shops centred around the Sabang, Small La Laguna and Big La Laguna beach areas. There are approximately 30 to 40 dive centres in the region, catering to everything from recreational fun dives to technical training. The infrastructure is real, the operators are competent, and the volume of guides who have been working these sites for fifteen and twenty years is the kind of institutional memory that separates a serious dive destination from a casual one.
The reefs are the proof. After a slow accumulation of dives across the Caribbean, the Red Sea, the Eastern Pacific and now Southeast Asia, I have not seen anything as healthy as these reefs in this small stretch of the Verde Island Passage. I am here right now and I am not in a hurry to leave.
