Cocos Island is a thickly forested Garden of Eden some 300 miles off the Costa Rican coast.  It is renowned for its large schools of hammerhead sharks.  You can also find huge numbers of other pelagics like white tips, giant moray eels, dolphins, sail fish, marbled rays and the odd whale shark.  Other common encounters are large schools of tuna, jacks, silky sharks, silver tip sharks, marlin, Creole fish, green turtles and octopus.

Inland Cocos is equally inspiring, with lush rainforests in which endemics such as the Cocos Island cuckoo have evolved in isolation far out in the Pacific.  This endemism is even evident underwater with seven unique species  of fish here including the Red-lipped Batfish.

Diving here is necessarily by self-sufficient dive liveaboard.  We arrange trips to both islands onboard two Undersea Hunter liveaboards, as well as the unique experience of exploring underwater by means of a  submersible.

Malpelo is a small collection of rock islands situated slight south and 340 nautical miles east of Cocos Island within Colombian territorial waters.  Like Cocos, these islands are protected, with a 6 miles fishing exclusion zone.  The result is a similarly incredible concentration of pelagic species.  Schools of hammerheads can reach up to 300 in number, often mixing with large numbers of silky sharks.  Galapagos sharks can also be found here and the rare sight of clusters of free swimming moray eels.  On the rocks you can see the world’s second largest colony of Masked Booby amounting to approximately 25,000 birds.

Aqua-Firma specialises in combining the Best of Above and Below Water travel, which for Cocos and Malpelo can easily include Costa Rica as well as Panama and Nicaragua.  Please refer to our web pages for travel ideas in these countries, or Contact Us.

 Click here for information about when to go to Cocos.