Las Setas

Las Setas — the Mushrooms — earns its name from the distinctive mushroom-shaped formations that rise from the seafloor at this intermediate Lanzarote dive site: basalt columns or boulders whose shape — broad above, narrower at the base — has been sculpted by erosion, biological encrustation, and the specific way that volcanic rock weathers into forms that invite botanical analogies. The mushroom formations provide both the dive's visual identity and the habitat around which its marine community is organised. The formation of mushroom-shaped basalt structures in Lanzarote's coastal waters involves the differential erosion of rock with varying hardness: where the upper section of a column or boulder is more resistant to wave and biological erosion than the base, the resulting shape gradually develops a broader cap and narrower stem over years of selective weathering. The encrusting organisms that colonise the upper surfaces — sponges building across the cap, anemones on the sheltered underside overhang — accelerate the visual impression of a mushroom by adding biological structure to the geological form. Each seta provides its own microhabitat: the upper cap surface hosts the grazing species that move across the algae-covered top, the cap's underside offers the sheltered, dim environment preferred by anemones and resting fish, and the base of the formation creates a crevice habitat at the junction with the sandy or rocky floor. Large moray eels occupy the base crevices of the more substantial formations, and common octopus den in the gaps between adjacent mushroom structures. The sandy areas between the mushroom formations host their own community: stingrays rest partially buried, and the sandy corridors between the structures invite scanning for the angel sharks that inhabit Lanzarote's southern coast dive sites. The intermediate depth range allows exploration of the full character of the mushroom formation zone — from the shallowest caps to the deepest base crevices — in a single dive. A visually distinctive and ecologically productive intermediate site.