Diving Cabo Pulmo: Bull Sharks, the Wall of Jacks, and Mexico’s Greatest Conservation Story

Diving Cabo Pulmo

By William Drumm, underwater photographer and ocean ambassador

Cabo Pulmo is the rarest thing in the ocean. It is a reef that came back. Forty years ago this stretch of coast on the East Cape of Baja California Sur had been fished down to almost nothing. The coral was still there, but the fish were gone. Today it holds one of the densest concentrations of fish anywhere in the Sea of Cortez, and divers travel from all over the world for two things above all: the bull sharks, and the wall of jacks.

I dove Cabo Pulmo in April 2024 on assignment for Citizen Watch, shooting the sea section of a campaign built around their 35th Promaster anniversary. This guide is what I learned in the water, combined with the practical information you need to plan your own trip: the dive sites, the seasons, the permits, and what you will realistically see beneath the surface.

Quick Facts: Diving Cabo Pulmo

• Where: the East Cape of Baja California Sur, Mexico, roughly 90 minutes north of Los Cabos International Airport (SJD)
• Protected status: Cabo Pulmo National Park, established 1995, and part of the UNESCO listed Islands and Protected Areas of the Gulf of California since 2005
• The headline: fish biomass increased 463 percent between 1999 and 2009, the largest recovery ever recorded in a marine reserve
• Signature dives: El Vencedor for bull sharks, Los Morros for the jack tornado
• Typical depths: most sites run 20 to 70 feet
• Water temperature: around 64F in the coldest winter months to 86F in late summer
• Permits: a CONANP conservation bracelet is required for every water activity, scuba and snorkel alike
• Certification: Open Water is enough for several sites, Advanced is useful for the deeper ones
• Snorkeling: genuinely excellent here, not a consolation prize

Where Is Cabo Pulmo and How Do You Get There?

Cabo Pulmo is a small fishing village on the East Cape of the Baja California Sur peninsula, facing the Sea of Cortez. Almost everyone arrives the same way: fly into Los Cabos International Airport (SJD), rent a car, and drive north for about 90 minutes. The final stretch of road into the village is partially unpaved. Any vehicle can make it, but give yourself extra time and do not expect to hurry.

If you would rather not drive, several Cabo San Lucas and San Jose del Cabo operators run day trips that include transport. It works, but it means a long day with three to four hours in a vehicle. Los Barriles is about 45 minutes away and La Ribera about 15, so both make easier bases than Cabo San Lucas if you want a shorter commute.

Set your expectations before you arrive. Cabo Pulmo is a village, not a resort town. Much of it runs on solar power, cell service is patchy, and there are only a handful of small restaurants. Bring cash, download offline maps, and plan to be off the grid for a few days. That lack of development is a large part of why the reef recovered in the first place.

Cabo Pulmo National Park: Mexico’s Greatest Conservation Story

By the early 1990s the reef at Cabo Pulmo was collapsing. Generations of local families had fished these waters, and they were the first to see that there was almost nothing left to catch. What happened next is the reason this place matters far beyond diving: the community stopped fishing. Not because a government forced them to, but because they decided the reef was worth more alive. They pushed for protection, and in 1995 the Mexican government declared Cabo Pulmo a national marine park and a no take zone.

Then they enforced it. That is the part most conservation stories miss. A protected area on paper does nothing. Cabo Pulmo worked because the people who lived there policed it themselves.

The results are staggering, and they are documented. A 2011 study published in PLOS ONE by Aburto-Oropeza and colleagues found that total fish biomass inside the reserve increased 463 percent between 1999 and 2009. The biomass of top predators, the truest measure of a reef’s health, increased roughly elevenfold. Comparable areas outside the reserve showed no significant increase over the same decade. The lead author put it plainly: no other marine reserve in the world has shown a fish recovery like this one.

For a diver, that statistic is not an abstraction. It is the reason the water in front of you is thick with fish. Everything you see at Cabo Pulmo, the sharks, the groupers, the tornado of jacks, exists because a village of fishermen chose to stop fishing.

The Dive Sites of Cabo Pulmo

The park protects a reef system several miles long, and operators rotate between sites depending on conditions, currents, and what has been showing up. These are the ones worth knowing by name.

El Vencedor

The most famous dive in the park, and the one you came for. El Vencedor is the wreck of a small ship that went down decades ago and now sits at roughly 50 to 70 feet. The structure works as a cleaning station and a gathering point, and it is the most reliable place in Cabo Pulmo to find bull sharks. They cruise the sand around the wreck, unhurried and largely indifferent to divers. This is where most of the park’s shark photographs are made.

Los Morros

A series of large rock formations covered in gorgonians and coral, averaging around 50 feet. This is where the tornado of jacks most often forms. It is considered an advanced dive because it can carry current and the visibility is sometimes reduced, but when the jacks are stacked here there is nothing else like it in Mexico.

El Cantil

The name means the cliff. This is the gentler side of Cabo Pulmo, a set of reef canyons running roughly 20 to 50 feet, cut with cracks, overhangs, and small caverns. It suits Open Water divers and it is a good first dive of a trip while you get your bearings.

El Bajo

A reef bar inside the park at around 50 to 70 feet. Worth clearing up a common misconception: El Bajo at Cabo Pulmo is not a deep offshore seamount, and it is not the main bull shark site. It is a productive reef dive in its own right, with good structure and plenty of fish.

Las Esperanzas and El Cien

Two more sites in the operators’ rotation. Ask your dive shop which are running on the day you arrive. Conditions, not preference, usually decide the schedule at Cabo Pulmo.

What You Will See: Marine Life of Cabo Pulmo

Bull sharks. The headline animal. They are resident here year round and they behave differently than bull sharks almost anywhere else, because they have not been hunted or baited. They are calm, curious, and mostly uninterested in you. Encounters typically happen around El Vencedor in 50 to 70 feet of water, often with several animals in view at once.

The wall of jacks. Thousands of bigeye trevally packed into a rotating column so dense it dims the sunlight. Unlike a lot of aggregations, this one is present through much of the year rather than for a few weeks. Swimming into the middle of it and looking up is one of the great experiences in diving.

Everything else. Green and hawksbill turtles, big schools of yellow snapper and porkfish, groupers of a size you rarely see on unprotected reefs, moray eels, stingrays and the occasional mobula ray. Humpback whales pass through the wider region in winter, and mobula aggregations can be spectacular in the right season. Whale sharks are an occasional visitor here but not a reliable draw, that is La Paz, about 90 minutes north.

When Is the Best Time to Dive Cabo Pulmo?

Cabo Pulmo is divable year round, but the experience changes a lot with the season, and there is an honest trade off to understand before you book.

For the best conditions, come October through December. This is peak season. Water sits somewhere around 80F to 86F, visibility is at its best at roughly 60 to 90 feet, and the weather is settled. It is also when the park is busiest.

For the coldest, quietest diving, come January through March. Water can drop to around 64F and you will want a thicker wetsuit. Visibility is lower, but the cold water brings its own rewards: mobula rays, blacktip sharks that only visit in winter, and humpback whales in the wider area.

For sharks, the picture is genuinely mixed, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise. Bull sharks are resident at Cabo Pulmo all year, so you have a real chance of seeing them whenever you go. Local operators report that the animals are most abundant in the cooler months, roughly December through May, with the largest aggregations from April into June, though that window also brings lower visibility. Other dive sources put the best shark encounters later in the year, from August through December, when the water is warmest and clearest. Both can be true: more sharks when the water is cool and green, better conditions to photograph them when it is warm and blue.

I dove in April and we saw bull sharks. If your single priority is the maximum number of sharks, aim for the cooler months and accept that the water will not be as clear. If you want the best all round diving with a strong chance of sharks, October to December is the safer bet.

Diving Conditions and What to Expect

Most Cabo Pulmo diving is boat diving from small pangas launched straight off the beach. The sites are close, so surface intervals are short and boat rides rarely take long. Depths are moderate, mostly 20 to 70 feet, which means generous bottom times.

Visibility swings from around 30 feet on a poor day to 90 feet or better in peak season. Currents are usually mild, though Los Morros can move. Bring a 3mm suit in summer and a 5mm or more in winter. Reef safe sunscreen is required in Mexican marine parks, and touching anything, coral, fish, or shark, is prohibited. The recovery here depends on the animals being left alone.

Snorkeling Cabo Pulmo: When Scuba Is Not Required

Cabo Pulmo is one of the few destinations where snorkeling is a genuine alternative to diving rather than a fallback. Several of the shallower reef areas sit in roughly 8 to 30 feet of water, well within snorkeling range, and they are full of life. If you are not certified, or you are traveling with people who are not, you can still see much of what makes this place famous.

Snorkelers regularly see dense schools of jacks, snappers and parrotfish, green and hawksbill turtles, and rays over the sand. What you will miss are the deeper sites, and that includes El Vencedor and its bull sharks, which sit well below snorkel depth. That is the honest trade.

Snorkeling is available from shore at certain entry points and on boat trips run by the same local operators who handle diving. Expect to pay somewhere in the region of forty to eighty dollars for a half day snorkel trip depending on the operator and group size. As with diving, a park permit is mandatory.

My Cabo Pulmo Dive Trip

I received an invitation to dive Cabo Pulmo for Citizen Watch’s 35th Promaster anniversary campaign. We went in April, which is not the clearest water of the year, and I would not trade the trip for anything.

The dream team

I was in the water alongside Erik Higuera and Jody MacDonald, with Converge Productions running the shoot. Being on assignment with photographers and filmmakers of that caliber changes how you work. You push harder, you stay down longer, and you come back with images you would not have made alone.

Diving with bull sharks

The bull sharks were the reason we came, and they did not disappoint. They move differently than sharks that have been hunted. There is no wariness in them. They cruise the sand around the wreck at El Vencedor, turning through the group of divers without hurry, close enough that a wide lens is the only sensible choice.

The wall of jacks

The jacks were the surprise. The water already was not clear, and the sheer volume of fish waste in the column made it exceptionally milky. There is so much of it that boat captains can find the school by smell. You can smell the fish from the surface before you ever get in.

Then you drop into it. Thousands of bigeye trevally, packed tight enough to darken the water above you, turning as one body. Swimming into the center of that and looking up is the single most disorienting and beautiful thing I have done underwater.

A day I will not forget: a solar eclipse, bull sharks, and Hit Me Hard and Soft

One dive will always stand apart. Not only because of the sharks and the jacks, but because of what happened on the surface. That day coincided with the launch of Billie Eilish’s album Hit Me Hard and Soft, whose cover I photographed. And there was a solar eclipse. We were not in the path of totality, but it was still extraordinary, and it gave the whole day a strange charge.

While I was underwater with bull sharks, Billie posted the album announcement on Instagram. The image she used was mine. She tagged me, like a real champ. I surfaced from the dive to thousands of new followers and a flood of messages I am still grateful for. Truly a day I will never forget.

The Citizen Watch campaign

At the time of this trip I was one of four official Citizen Promaster Sea Ambassadors, a role that ended in April 2026. It gave me the chance to work with a team like this one and to tell ocean stories at a scale I could not reach on my own.

The icing was seeing the finished commercial that Citizen Watch and Converge Productions cut from the trip. What we shot in Cabo Pulmo became the sea section of the Advocates for Adventure campaign, and it ran everywhere from Disney+ to a screen in Times Square. The Cabo Pulmo expedition remains one of the most meaningful collaborations of my career.

Practical Information: Operators, Permits, and Logistics

Permits: the conservation bracelet

Cabo Pulmo is a national marine park, and CONANP, the Mexican protected areas commission, requires a paid permit for every water activity inside it. That includes scuba, snorkeling, and free diving. Payment is made through the conservation bracelet, which you wear on your wrist as proof. Expect roughly 215 pesos per person per day, around eleven or twelve US dollars. Children under six, permanent residents, and visitors with disabilities are exempt, and discounts apply to students, teachers, and Mexican nationals.

Your operator is legally obliged to collect this for you, so it is normally folded into the cost of your trip. If nobody hands you a bracelet, ask.

Operators

All of the dive shops in Cabo Pulmo are small and locally owned, which is not an accident. The community that saved this reef also runs the diving on it. Cabo Pulmo Divers was the first, founded in 1990 by Mario Castro Lucero. Cabo Pulmo Beach Resort Dive Center has operated since the park was created, and Cabo Pulmo Sport Center is a long standing PADI shop. Cabo Pulmo Adventures and Cabo Pulmo EcoAdventures also run daily trips. Any of them will handle your permits and tanks.

Book ahead, and mean it

This is the single most useful thing in this guide. The park limits the number of boats allowed in per day, and once capacity is reached, sites close. In peak season divers can wait a day or two for a permit to the most in demand sites. If you are traveling a long way to dive El Vencedor, reserve well in advance and build a spare day into your trip.

What to bring

A 3mm suit in summer or 5mm and up in winter, reef safe sunscreen, cash for permits and tips, your certification card, and offline maps. Gear rental is available from every shop. Cell service is unreliable, so sort your logistics before you arrive.

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Frequently Asked Questions About Diving Cabo Pulmo

When is the best time to dive Cabo Pulmo?

Cabo Pulmo is divable year round. The best overall conditions run October through December, when water sits around 80F to 86F and visibility reaches roughly 60 to 90 feet. January through March is coldest, near 64F, with lower visibility but mobula rays, winter blacktip sharks, and humpbacks in the wider region. Bull sharks are resident all year, and local operators report the largest aggregations in the cooler months, roughly December through May.

Are there bull sharks at Cabo Pulmo?

Yes, and they are the main reason most divers come. Bull sharks are resident year round in the marine park. The most reliable place to find them is El Vencedor, a wreck sitting at roughly 50 to 70 feet, where they cruise the sand around the structure. Because they have never been hunted or baited here, they are notably calm around divers.

What is the wall of jacks at Cabo Pulmo?

It is a huge aggregation of bigeye trevally, sometimes thousands of fish, that forms a rotating tornado dense enough to block the sunlight. It most often forms at Los Morros. Unlike many aggregations it is present through much of the year rather than for a short season, and divers can swim into the middle of it.

How do I get to Cabo Pulmo?

Cabo Pulmo is on the East Cape of Baja California Sur, about 90 minutes north of Los Cabos International Airport (SJD) by car. Most visitors fly into SJD and drive. The last stretch of road into the village is partially unpaved but passable in any vehicle. There is no airport in Cabo Pulmo itself.

Do I need a permit to dive Cabo Pulmo?

Yes. Cabo Pulmo is a national marine park and CONANP requires a paid permit for all water activity, including snorkeling and free diving as well as scuba. Payment is made through a conservation bracelet worn on the wrist, roughly 215 pesos per person per day. Your dive operator is required to collect it and normally includes it in the trip cost.

What dive sites are at Cabo Pulmo?

The main sites are El Vencedor (a wreck at 50 to 70 feet, the reliable bull shark dive), Los Morros (rock formations around 50 feet where the jack tornado forms, and an advanced dive due to current), El Cantil (reef canyons at 20 to 50 feet, suitable for Open Water divers), El Bajo (a reef bar at 50 to 70 feet), plus Las Esperanzas and El Cien. Operators rotate sites based on conditions.

What is the conservation story behind Cabo Pulmo?

By the early 1990s local fishing families had watched the reef collapse from overfishing. They voluntarily stopped fishing and pushed for protection, and in 1995 Mexico declared Cabo Pulmo a no take national marine park. Crucially, the community enforced it themselves. A 2011 study in PLOS ONE found fish biomass increased 463 percent between 1999 and 2009, with top predators up roughly elevenfold. It is the largest recovery ever recorded in a marine reserve.

Can you snorkel at Cabo Pulmo without a scuba certification?

Yes, and it is genuinely good rather than a consolation prize. Several shallower reef areas sit in about 8 to 30 feet of water, where snorkelers regularly see schools of jacks and snapper, turtles, and rays. You will miss the deeper sites, including El Vencedor and its bull sharks. Snorkel trips run roughly forty to eighty dollars for a half day, and a park permit is required.

Can you see whale sharks at Cabo Pulmo?

Whale sharks are an occasional visitor but not a reliable draw at Cabo Pulmo. The dependable whale shark destination in the region is La Paz, about 90 minutes north, where they gather from roughly October through April. If whale sharks are a priority, plan a separate La Paz day rather than expecting them here.

What certification do I need to dive Cabo Pulmo?

Open Water is enough for several sites, including El Cantil. Advanced Open Water is useful for the deeper dives such as El Vencedor and Los Morros, and Los Morros can carry current. Operators check certification before every trip.

What should I bring on a Cabo Pulmo dive trip?

A 3mm wetsuit in summer or 5mm and up in winter, reef safe sunscreen (required in Mexican marine parks), cash for permits and tips, your certification card, and offline maps, since cell service is unreliable. Gear rental is available from all local shops.

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