The reef starts a hundred metres offshore. Everything else is a short drive.
Which snorkel boat actually reaches El Cielo. What a beach club pass covers before you pay at the gate. Reviews of every tour you can book on Cozumel.
Palancar, a sandbar you can stand on, a beach club and a first tank.
Four bookings a first Cozumel trip is built around, what each one costs, and what the people who took it say.
01The reef morningCozumel Snorkeling Tour: Palancar, Columbia and El Cielo ReefsPalancar, Columbia and the El Cielo shallows on one boat. The three names every diver on the island repeats.
02The lazy dayMr. Sanchos Beach Club All-Inclusive Day PassOne gate price on the calm west shore covers the food, the bar and the loungers. Turn up at ten and stop deciding.
03The island dayATV 4×4+Snorkeling+Beach Club+ Lunch+Sabores de CozumelA 4x4 into the scrub, a swim off the boat and lunch, in the same booking. The most tour you can buy in one day here.
04The first tankDiscover Scuba Diving in Cozumel Paradise ReefA shallow reef with an instructor holding your gauge. Cozumel is where a lot of people learn drift diving.
On Cozumel the decision is only which piece of reef.
The wall drops away a few hundred metres off the west shore and the current runs south to north, so the boat drops you in and picks you up downstream. Three ways to be out there, and what it costs to get on each one.
The days out more people book than anything else on Cozumel.
Every Cozumel tour we have reviewed →Beach club passes and reef boats take most of the island traffic. These are the ones travellers keep choosing, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Mr. Sanchos Beach Club All-Inclusive Day Pass
Review of Mr. Sanchos Beach Club in Cozumel, with all-you-can-eat food, open-bar drinks, beach time, kayaks, costs, and useful tips.
From · $79
Read our review →
2
Paradise Beach Club All-Inclusive Day Pass
from $81
3
ATV 4×4+Snorkeling+Beach Club+ Lunch+Sabores de Cozumel
from $89
4
Cozumel Snorkeling Tour: Palancar, Columbia and El Cielo Reefs
5
3 Reefs Boat Tour with Drinks and Snorkeling
from $57
6
The Cozumel Turtle Sanctuary Snorkel Tour
from $65
7
Submarine Atlantis Cozumel Adventure by Day & Sunset
from $120
8
Private Jeep Excursion in Cozumel with Lunch and Snorkeling
from $74
Past the ring road, Cozumel is scrub, limestone and empty track.
The island is thirty miles of flat jungle with one paved loop round it. Buggies and jeeps take the dirt cuts through the middle to the caverns, the ruins at San Gervasio and the wild eastern shore where nobody swims.
Palancar and Columbia are the reason divers keep coming back.
Coral heads the size of houses, swim-throughs cut into the wall, and forty metres of visibility on a good morning. The current does the swimming. You mostly hang there and watch it go past.
A Cozumel beach club is a gate price, not a sunbed rental.
One payment at Mr Sanchos, Paradise or KUZÁ buys the loungers, the buffet, the bar and usually a kayak. Read what the pass actually includes before you pick, because the cheap gate and the all-in gate are different days out.
Every beach club pass →What a day on Cozumel actually costs.
Every tour on the site grouped by price. A reef boat and a gate pass sit in completely different brackets, and a lot of the best water here is in the cheapest one.
Glass-bottom runs, park entry, a taxi tour of San Miguel and the short snorkel hops off the west shore.
The island standards: three-reef boats, beach club passes with the buffet, buggy days and the El Cielo trips.
Private boats to the sandbar, chartered jeep days and the small-group dives that keep the group at four.
Three things Cozumel has that the mainland does not.
Beach clubs and cenotes run the length of the Riviera Maya. A sandbar you can stand on in the open sea, a wall you drift down without kicking, and a Mayan crossing that women made by canoe do not.
El Cielo
Off the south-west corner the sea floor rises into a shelf of white sand in water barely up to your chest, a mile from anything. Starfish sit on it in numbers, which is why the rule is look and never lift one out of the water. There is no road to it and no jetty, so every trip out here is somebody's boat, and the sandbar is at its clearest before the fleet arrives at eleven.
- 1Cozumel Snorkeling Tour: Palancar, Columbia and El Cielo Reefs★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 1,462 reviews
- 2Lagoon 39ft Private Catamaran 5hr – El Cielo Full Experience★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 600 reviews
- 3El Cielo, Palancar Snorkel & Beach Party Experience★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 535 reviews
The Palancar wall
Cozumel dives are drift dives. The boat drops you upcurrent, the water carries you along the reef at walking pace and the captain follows your bubbles to pick you up wherever you surface. Palancar runs for several kilometres in a chain of coral buttresses cut with caves and swim-throughs; Columbia, further south, is the deeper, quieter half of it.
- 1Cozumel Snorkeling Tour: Palancar, Columbia and El Cielo Reefs★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 1,462 reviews
- 2El Cielo, Palancar Snorkel & Beach Party Experience★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 535 reviews
- 3El Cielo, Palancar Reef, and Beach Party with Food★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 257 reviews
San Gervasio
Before it was a cruise port this was a shrine. Mayan women crossed the channel by canoe at least once in their lives to petition Ix Chel at San Gervasio, and the site in the middle of the island is what survives of that: low stone platforms and an arch under the trees, twenty minutes off the ring road.
- 1Jade Caverns and Mayan Village Cozumel ATV TOUR★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 507 reviews
- 2Authentic Mayan Cooking Class in Cozumel★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 344 reviews
- 3Island Buggy Tour & Mayan Experience★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 305 reviews
A north wind shuts the port, and Cozumel moves inland for the day.
Between November and March a cold front comes down the Gulf, the swell gets up on the east side and the port captain closes the water to small boats. It is not a washout. The caverns, the kitchens and the ruins sit in the middle of the island where the wind never reaches, and they run all day regardless.
Four Cozumel bookings that will not wait for the morning.
Most of this island can be arranged over breakfast. These four run on boat capacity, park gates and a cruise timetable that fills every seat on the island by nine.
- 01Cozumel Snorkeling Tour: Palancar, Columbia and El Cielo ReefsSmall boats, a fixed number of seats and a sandbar that gets busy from late morning. The early departures sell out first.
- 02Mr Sanchos Romantic Day Beach Pass for TwoThe big west-shore clubs cap how many passes they sell in a day and ship arrivals take a large share of them.
- 03Discover Scuba Diving in Cozumel Paradise ReefAn instructor can take a very small group, so a first tank is a booking, not a walk-up.
- 04Official Chankanaab Park Day pass and Snorkel with Lunch includedThe park sells timed entry and the dolphin and snorkel slots inside it run to their own clock.
By where on the island
By kind of day - water, track, table or gate
The newest Cozumel tour reviews.
The rest of the new ones →
Explore Cozumel on a Buggy: Tour Around the Island!
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Adventure in Punta Sur Ecological Reserve Cozumel
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ATV Jungle discovering the wild Jade Cavern and Mayan Village
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Cozumel Playa Palancar VIP All Inclusive Day Pass
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Private Jeep Tour Full Experience and ATV with Caverns & Cedral
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Best Island tour (dowtown, Beach, mayan Park & tastings)
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