Guadalupe Island
Guadalupe Island's famous great white shark cage diving is CLOSED. Mexican authorities shut the biosphere reserve to all tourism, announcing in January 2023 that shark-viewing activity would not resume, and no permits have been issued since. No trips can be booked, and any operator advertising Guadalupe cage diving should be treated with suspicion. This page stays in the atlas as a record of what the site was: the clearest, most reliable white shark viewing the sport ever had.
Pourquoi plonger ici
From the early 2000s until 2022, Guadalupe was the benchmark for white shark cage diving. A volcanic island 240 km off Baja California, it combined a large seasonal aggregation of great whites with 30-45 m visibility in blue oceanic water - conditions Australia and South Africa could rarely match - and calm anchorages off its leeward northeast coast. Liveaboards ran roughly August through January as the sharks arrived to hunt seals and, researchers believe, to socialize and feed ahead of offshore migrations; individual animals were photo-identified year after year, and the island contributed heavily to white shark science. The Mexican government suspended tourism in 2022 and made the closure indefinite in 2023, citing protection of the reserve. Nothing about the biology changed: the sharks, the fur seals, and the elephant seals are still there, unwatched. Divers who want caged white shark encounters today look to South Australia's Neptune Islands; Guadalupe remains closed, and this entry carries no booking information because none legitimately exists.
Les sites de plongée (1)
| Site | Type | Profondeur | Niveau | Accès | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Northeast Anchorage (historical cage-diving area) Formerly the world's clearest, most reliable white shark cage viewing; now… | Blue water | 0–10 m | Beginner | Liveaboard |
La vie marine, planifiée à l'avance
Great white sharks in seasonal aggregation, Guadalupe fur seals (an endemic recovery success), northern elephant seals, California sea lions, yellowfin tuna, and open-ocean visitors drawn by the island's isolation.