In this guide, I want to share my experience diving the Rosario Islands in January of 2026.

I intentionally didn’t do much research before coming here, as I wanted to be surprised.

The Rosario Islands are about an hour boat ride away from Cartagena, Colombia.

I was in the area for a friends wedding, and the Rosario Islands seemed to be where all the diving charters were headed.

I went with the charter Diving Planet, as they had several great reviews and picked me up close to my Airbnb.

Diving Planet gives you the option to stay overnight at one of the many resorts on the Rosario Islands for multiple days of diving, but I elected to do two fun dives.

Rosario Islands Dive Sites

Here's a picture of the top dive sites that Diving Planet takes customers to.

We dove two sites being Baja Perdido and Gloria which they claimed were two of the best.

If anyone has additional original imagery from these dive sites let me know so we can improve this guide!

Baja Perdido

The first site we did was Baja Perdido, and it was my least favorite of the two. It's on the Northern side of the island, and relatively flat, although it can get deep.

Main attractions being pockets of colorful coral, and schooling fish.

The Divemasters carried polespears for invasive Lionfish, they speared a couple each dive.

There were several colorful triggerfish swimming in and out of coral structures, but oddly enough, these were the largest fish we saw at this site.

Gloria

After a long surface interval we went for our second dive at Gloria.

This site is on the South Western point of the islands, and was structured differently than the first. It's a wall ranging from 15-20 feet at the top all the way down to 100+ ft at its deepest.

The wall seemed to go on forever and was decked out in coral of all different kinds, many of which I'd never seen before.

‍

While it was awesome to see such healthy reefs with vertical structure, it really did feel like something was missing diving here.

Besides schools of Parrotfish, Tangs, and whatever these blue fish were, there wasn't a ton of activity on the reef.

When to Dive the Rosario Islands

Divers visit the the Rosario Islands year-round but the dry season (December to May) is generally the best time to go.

In January, the guides and myself were diving without a shirt on as the water was between 82F-84.2F.

What Do You Think?

Based on the video and content you see here, is this a place you'd go scuba diving?

Let me know inside of my global scuba diver community: 👉 https://skool.com/scuba-divers