Top 10 Freediving Spots All Around The World

Posted on June 09, 2020

Author: Nick Pelios

Which Are The Best Locations For Freediving According To Daan

Which are the 10 best freediving spots around the world? Being one of the leading freediving photographers in the game, Alchemy partner Daan Verhoeven has traveled around a few spots. Here's the list of his favorite locations, in no particular order!

"My name is Daan Verhoeven, I'm a freediving cameraman and I'm often asked which are my favorite locations to freedive. Well one of them is here at Cornwall, in the UK. In that sea you can swim with blue sharks! Now, blue sharks are great to dive with. Not only are they intensely blue and beautiful,they're also a little bit less shy than other sharks, so it's easier to approach them, easier to get a little bit closer to them, and so you can actually swim with them, rather than them swimming away from you. Also in Cornwall, are seals, both common seals and Atlantic grey seals. They have colonies around here, you can find them around all year. What's nice about seals is that you can really connect with them and once you've gained that trust, they can be very playful. I also love the caves and gullies around here. You'll see in this video that caves and wrecks are a bit of a theme in my love for freediving. I don't like tight spaces on land but for some reason in water I want to see if I can wriggle through.

This is my Top 10 Freediving Spots! There's no real order to them, in that I don't love one more than I love the other. They are such different locations, so I figured I'd go through them geographically".

Ibiza

Ibiza is known as a bit of a party island, and it certainly can be, but the sea is also really good for freediving. The reason I picked it as one of my top spots though, is that I fell in love with a cave there, yes, with a cave! Ibiza's got a cave of light and it's mind-blowing beautiful. That entry, the shaft of light at the right time of day, the darkness in the back. It's so thrilling. From Ibiza we go to...

Italy

Italy has some gorgeous sea and Sardinia might be the most blue that I've ever seen, but I want to go to Italy for a pool. I know it's weird traveling for a pool, but Y40 is not a normal pool. It is the deepest pool in the world at 40 metres and the water is 30 degrees so you can dive without a suit on. At some point in your life you have to experience freefall this way, it's delicious! Plus the people who run it are freedivers, are really nice and if you're lucky you can stay at the hotel; they have great food and wine.

Greece

Kalamata! That bay is lovely and about a 30-minute drive from there is a place called Kardamyli. Again, caves, really good caves. I did one of my scariest, narrowest dives there and came out giggling like a madman. I literally had to crawl through there, scraping my camera over the bottom. I loved, loved, loved it! From there it's only a short way to...

Cyprus

That island has a lot going for it, some of the clearest waters I've ever seen, we've had visibility of 50 metres, enough to give you vertigo! A generally calm sea, caves, but also some spectacular wrecks. My favorite wreck in the world is the Zenobia, which starts at 20 meters deep and you can go in there. It scares me every time and it's just so exciting! And I love how it just goes on and on and on, it's more than a hundred and seventy meters long, plus you can find quite friendly turtles in Cyprus and fantastic food.

Dahab

You can't discuss the freediving spots without mentioning the original Mecca! Yes, obviously, the famous Blue Hole is fantastic to train in and very beautiful, but also around there is the Saddle - full of lively coral and fish, El Bells - with its very cool little stream swim through at 27 meters, Canyon - a crack in the floor, 20 meters deep, that goes all the way down to, well, the bottom! You can visit the eels at Eel Garden and the elephant in the bay, etc. Dahab has lots to offer, just be careful of the yalla yalla.

Indonesia

That's a mother of a flight from Europe but it's well worth it. Bali is such a great place to visit; amazing food, super nice people, the water there has a soft golden quality. There are some fun wrecks where you can play and year-round possibilities to train. When you're in that area you'd be crazy not to visit Gili Trawangan or the other Gili islands. They are like little bubbles of heaven, no motorized traffic, all the peace and love and food and diving you could want! I spent a week there and all I did was eat sleep and dive. It was pure bliss!

Yucatan

There you find the cenotes; a natural phenomenon where crystal-clear waters meet sea waters, meet caves, meet rivers, meet everything! If you'd ask an artist to combine

everything that water can be and distribute it over a relatively compact area ,you get cenotes. Some are massive, some are tiny, some drenched in sunshine, some are hidden in darkness, some are fresh but then salty, some are gardens, some are forests, and all of them are magical and fantastic in their own way.

Dean's Blue Hole

If there was a God and she had put her finger down to create the perfect freediving spot, Dean's Blue Hole would be it! It lays 20 meters of a white beach, it's protected by cliffs most of the way around and by a reef the rest of the way, so you get no currents, no wind chop, no thermocline, just 200 meters of perfect depth. For me as a cameraman, I couldn't ask for a better backdrop for depth competitions. It is gorgeous from all angles, especially when you go to a key spot and you get that massive overview.

Dominica

The bay of Soufriere is in a caldera, let's say a crater of a volcano and is protected from all sides. It's deep, there's barely any current, it's warm! What I love about it most, it is lively, the whole island is green and even the sea is bubbling, full of life. All the fish live there, all of them. You can play with them, swim through them. If you get a bit tired from training, you can go to a waterfall and get energized there, or lay in a hot spring. Dominica will recharge your battery like nothing else.

UK

We've seen seas and oceans, pools and rivers, but we haven't seen a lake or quarry yet! There's a quarry called NDAC and it's like a playground for freedivers. You can go up and down, yes, but also play in a bus or plane, or tunnels! It's a former chalk quarry so the water is quite clear and it has this beautiful greenish blue color. It has this weird quality of being both manmade and natural at the same time - there's something quite spooky & fun about that.

Obviously I've missed a lot of spots in this video, I haven't been everywhere and I'd love to explore Asia more, and I'd love to go to South America more, and North America and Antarctica and Australia! So if you have any of your favorite spots you'd like to recommend, leave them in the comments and hopefully next year I'll be able to visit them"!