Punta Sal Coral Garden

The reef that launched a thousand research papers. The shallow coral garden at the tip of Punta Sal, inside Jeannette Kawas National Park, holds elkhorn and staghorn coral at densities not recorded anywhere else in the Caribbean for over thirty years. Scientists attribute the health partly to cold upwellings from the shelf edge that buffer temperatures during basin-wide bleaching events. Divers drift over formations that look like the Caribbean did before the 1980s die-offs — a living baseline the rest of the region has lost.