After 143 dives, I’ve learned what makes a scuba destination stand out, from its shipwrecks to its underwater caves to its memorable marine life. In Curaçao , something else grabbed my attention amid the island’s numerous dive sites: underwater “forests” that, despite their name, contain no trees at all.
Curaçao is known for having some of the Caribbean’s most exceptional diving , with many of its best sites off the island’s northwestern tip, away from Willemstad’s colorful Dutch colonial architecture and the centrally located beachfront resorts. On a couple of visits to this autonomous Dutch Caribbean country, I explored a few of these spots with Go West Diving , including the colorful Sponge Forest, known for its abundance of sponges in a variety of shapes and hues along a sloping wall.
These aren’t the sponges you use to wash dishes, although the synthetic items by the kitchen sink were, in fact, named after their living, aquatic counterparts. In the wild, marine sponges are delicate, simple living organisms, lacking brains, organs, and nervous systems, despite having risen in pop culture via a certain cartoon character with square pants.
Curaçao’s sponges come in a range of natural colors and forms. As you drift dive across the Sponge Forest, shades of orange appear in the form of rope sponges, which resemble clusters of branches, and orange elephant ear sponges, which, unsurprisingly, look like rigid versions of the pachyderm’s ears. Bright ambers and golds pop from the presence of yellow tube sponges, named for their color and shape, also found in bundles. Stove-pipe sponges, which grow to about five feet tall, are slender, cylindrical, and often in hues of purple, while wide giant barrel sponges typically display a reddish tint.
Add in the natural blues and greens of the aquatic surroundings, and the scene virtually covers all the colors of the rainbow—even before you start focusing in on all the colorful fish that feed in this nutrient-rich environment. I’ve seen rainbow parrotfish, blue tangs, blackbar soldierfish, butterflyfish, filefish, trunkfish, honeycomb cowfish, free-swimming green moray eels, and stingrays gliding over sandy patches of the ocean floor.
These marine creatures also meander another nearby “forest,” a popular dive site named after fungi. The Mushroom Forest is neither a forest in a terrestrial sense, nor does it comprise mushrooms. Rather, it’s an array of coral formations that, while lacking the wide color spectrum of sponges, have grown upwards and formed heads that unmistakably resemble mushrooms. Imagine a field of boulders all adorned with mushroom caps and you have an image of another one of Curaçao’s iconic scuba sites.
The rest of Curaçao’s eclectic must-dive list includes reefs, underwater caves, sunken ships, cars, and even an airplane wreck, all with healthy coral growth that attracts and sustains marine life. Every nook and crevice of their structures, whether naturally formed or human-made, supports biodiversity. It’s not uncommon to encounter small creatures like nudibranchs or banded coral shrimp, or larger animals like turtles and nurse sharks, so there’s still plenty to marvel at after you’ve made your way out of Curaçao’s make-believe forests.
Read the original article on Travel & Leisure
