Stingray City

Stingray City is one of the most famous and most visited dive sites in the world — a shallow sandbar in Grand Cayman's North Sound where southern stingrays have been gathering for decades to interact with divers and snorkellers, creating an experience so consistently remarkable that it has become the defining image of Grand Cayman diving and one of the Caribbean's most iconic wildlife encounters. The story of Stingray City begins with the fishermen who anchored in the North Sound to clean their catch, dropping fish scraps overboard. Southern stingrays — Hypanus americanus, large Atlantic rays with wingspans reaching one and a half metres — learned to associate the sound of boat engines with food and began gathering at the site in increasing numbers. By the 1980s, divers were visiting specifically to interact with the rays, and the site became the managed, celebrated destination it remains today. The stingrays at Stingray City number in the dozens on a typical visit. These animals, fully accustomed to human presence over generations of regular interaction, approach divers and snorkellers with complete confidence — gliding over the white sand bottom, brushing against the legs of standing snorkellers at the shallow sandbar, and actively seeking the squid and other food that dive operators provide under managed conditions. Up close, the southern stingray is extraordinary: the silky smoothness of its upper surface, the expressiveness of its spiracle vents, and the delicate articulation of its pectoral fins in swimming are impossible to appreciate from a boat deck but fully available to divers level with these animals on the sandbar. The depth at Stingray City is minimal — typically three to five metres at the main sandbar — making this accessible to snorkellers as well as divers. For certified divers, the experience of being submerged among dozens of large rays gliding across the white sand in Grand Cayman's brilliant, clear water is something that descriptions and photographs genuinely fail to capture. An unmissable dive for anyone visiting Grand Cayman.