Cabo Pulmo National Park

Cabo Pulmo shelters the oldest of the very few hard-coral reefs on the Pacific coast of North America, in a small bay on Baja California Sur's East Cape. The village's fishing families petitioned for protection themselves, the park was declared in 1995, and the community switched from nets to dive tourism. The result is one of conservation's best-known recoveries: fish biomass rebounded dramatically within fifteen years, and today divers swim through tornadoes of bigeye jacks, resident bull sharks, grouper, and seasonal mobula aggregations over reef ridges in 5–20 m of water. The park is compact — about 71 km² — and everything runs from the beach at Cabo Pulmo village.

The rules that bind divers

The park is effectively no-take: all fishing and collecting are banned inside its boundaries, a rule the community itself enforces alongside CONANP. Visitors pay a national protected-area fee, usually handled by the dive shop, and diving is done with local operators from small pangas launched off the beach; boat numbers and site rotation are managed to spread pressure. Anchoring on reef is prohibited, gloves and touching are barred, and rangers can suspend activities when bull shark or weather conditions warrant.

Fees & permits: Federal protected-area entry fee per visitor per day, typically collected by local operators.