Scuba diving in the Santa Lucia Sandbank

The sandbank is approximately 300 m from the coast and is made up of three different sized rock formations. Your scuba diving starts from the biggest rock of the three whose peak is only 6 metres below the surface.

The base of the sandbank is 25 m below the surface, and as you go down you will notice that the rocks are covered in peacock's tail, while damselfish and saddled seabreamswim all around you. If you swim futher out, where the rocks are 15 metres below the surface, you will notice they are covered in Parazoanthus (parazoanthus axinellae) and yellow sea fans.

If you swim towards the bottom of the rocks you will see that the first crevices have become the perfect homes for large, european and moray eels.

Now you can head for the second rock that faces Portoferraio and whose morphological charateristics are the same as those of the first one but here you will also come across octopus and shoals of corvina drums among the posidonia.

Once you swim to the third rock, the smallest of the three, that faces the coast, photographers say they have often seen nudibranchs. At this point, using the first and largest rock of the three as a reference point, you can start swimming back up to the surface and head back to your boat.

Photographs kindly lent by Riccardo Buralli - Diving in Elba