Gibraltar Wreck Diving: What The Second World War Actually Left On The Seabed

27 August 2026 Last checked 2026-08-27

The frogman wrecks people come to Gibraltar to dive are not there. Here is what actually lies on the bottom, who put most of it there, and the diving permit almost nobody mentions.

Search for Gibraltar wreck diving and sooner or later you will read that you can dive the wrecks of Italy's human torpedo campaign. You cannot. Not one of the ships the Italian frogmen sank between 1941 and 1943 appears on any Gibraltar dive list we could find, and the tanker they rode out of was cut up for scrap in an Italian yard in 1961.

The diving here is still worth the trip. It is just that almost everything good about it was put on the seabed on purpose, by a local doctor who started sinking barges off Camp Bay in 1974, and getting in the water legally requires a permit that most travel pages never mention.

Where the frogman wrecks went

The campaign itself was real and it was extraordinary. Between September 1941 and August 1943 Italian frogmen and manned torpedo crews hit merchant shipping in Gibraltar harbour, most of it launched from a salvaged tanker moored in neutral Spain. We have written the full account of the Olterra and the man sent to stop her elsewhere, so this piece is only about what survived it underwater. The short answer is almost nothing.

Take RFA Denbydale, the 8,145 ton fleet oiler whose back was broken by a limpet mine on 19 September 1941 and who is often described as sunk. She was patched, spent the rest of the war as a hulk at Gibraltar, and then arrived at Blyth in Northumberland on 22 July 1957 to be scrapped. She is not on the bottom. She is razor blades.

The Olterra herself went the same way, broken up at Vado Ligure in 1961, with the surviving fittings ending up in Italy rather than here. There is no hatch below the waterline to swim through, because there is no hull.

The pattern is not an accident. Gibraltar harbour is a working commercial port and always has been, and a working port does not leave wrecks lying in its own approaches. Ships that go down inside the moles get raised, patched, towed away or cut up, because the alternative is losing a berth. The frogmen attacked the one part of Gibraltar's coast where nothing is allowed to stay sunk.

The one wartime wreck on the usual list

There is a single genuine Second World War wreck that local dive lists agree on, and it is not a ship. An aircraft sits in roughly 35 metres of water and is generally described as a Bristol bomber that came down during the war. It is the only wartime entry on Gibraltar's standard dive inventory.

We are going to be careful here, because this is where sites start guessing. The exact type, the squadron and the date of the loss are not something we could pin down from any source we would be willing to cite. If the aircraft is your reason for booking, ask the dive operator to tell you precisely what they think it is before you pay.

What is actually down there

Here is the real inventory, with the wartime column filled in honestly rather than hopefully.

The SS Rosslyn is the one most divers rate highest. She was returning from Malta in ballast, dragged her anchor in a gale and foundered on the South Mole, and her bow now stands about 10 metres proud of the seabed with a list to starboard. The SS Excellent lies upside down off the detached mole and is the easier of the two to read, which is why it gets used for wreck specialty courses.

The reef a doctor started in 1973

This is the part of the story that deserves the attention the frogmen get. In the early 1970s the marine life in Gibraltar's southern waters was visibly collapsing. Eric Shaw, a local doctor and diver, proposed building an artificial reef in 1973 to give what was left somewhere to breed.

The early attempts were failures worth knowing about. Chained tyres were swept off or buried by sand. Stones did no better. What finally worked was hulls: two barges donated locally and sunk in Camp Bay in 1974, which became the first artificial reef built in Europe as the project is generally described. More than 30 vessels have gone down as part of it since.

Shaw helped found the Helping Hand Trust in 1994 to run it, and the additions kept coming, including a 65 ton wooden boat called True Joy in 2006. He was also one of the founders of the Gibraltar Sub Aqua Club, formed in 1972 and now branch 888 of the British Sub Aqua Club. Two men diving off a rocky beach in the 1970s are the reason there is anything to look at.

The reef also caused an international incident. In July 2013 the Government of Gibraltar, working separately from Shaw's trust, dropped about 70 concrete blocks with protruding metal bars into the bay. Spanish trawlermen said the bars wrecked their nets, Spain said the blocks had been laid without authorisation in waters that were not Gibraltar's, and checks at the frontier tightened sharply that summer. The blocks are still there.

One modern wreck is missing for the opposite reason. The bulk carrier New Flame collided with a tanker about 1.5 km off Europa Point on 12 August 2007, settled on the bottom, and broke in two that December. Salvors then spent two years taking her away, finishing in December 2009 with more than 50,000 tons of cargo and wreckage removed. Roughly a third of the wreck fragments were deliberately left where they lay, on the reasoning that pulling them out would do more damage than leaving them.

The permit almost nobody mentions

Diving in British Gibraltar Territorial Waters is not a free for all, and this is the single most useful thing on this page. Under the Marine Protection Regulations 2014 there are ten permit classes running from A to K. Class F is the one for divers. Class G is the one a dive business needs. You dive either on your own Class F permit or under the licence of a permitted operator.

The catch is who can hold a full Class F. The Government's own guidance states that a full permit is issued only on proof of residency in Gibraltar or proof of affiliation to a local diving club, and that it runs for up to three years. Temporary permits are valid for 14 days. If you are flying in for a long weekend, the temporary permit or a licensed operator is your route, not the full one.

What you have to produce is specific: identification, a photograph to passport standard, insurance, a medical certificate, your qualifications, and vessel documentation if a boat is involved. Bring the certification cards you actually hold rather than a screenshot of a logbook.

One honest caveat. The guidance booklet contradicts itself in the diving section, saying in one sentence that diving is only allowed with a Class G permit and in the next that a full Class F is issued on proof of residency or club affiliation. Class G is plainly the operator permit everywhere else in the same document. Do not take our reading of it as final. Email info.environment@gibraltar.gov.gi or call 200 48450 and get it in writing, and check the current permit classes and application form before you travel.

Two more things the regulations are blunt about. You must carry your permit within British Gibraltar Territorial Waters and produce it to a police officer or a warden on request, and failing to do so is an offence. Permits are non transferable, so borrowing a friend's is an offence too.

Conditions, and the honest odds

Water temperature is the easy part. Published monthly averages put Gibraltar's sea at roughly 15.8 degrees Celsius in February, its coldest month, and about 23.3 degrees in August, its warmest, so a 5 mm suit covers most of the year and a 7 mm or a semi dry is sensible either side of summer. May to October is the stable window.

The variable that catches people out is wind. Gibraltar has two dominant ones, the easterly Levanter and the westerly Poniente, and they do not affect both coasts equally. A Levanter that makes the eastern side unworkable can leave Camp Bay and the western dive sites perfectly calm, and the reverse happens too. If you have booked a specific site, expect to be moved. Our explainer on the Levanter cloud covers why the Rock generates its own weather.

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There are also areas where the rules change under you. The Southern Waters of Gibraltar are designated both a Special Area of Conservation and a Special Protection Area, and the regulations single out a hatched area within the Rosia Marine Conservation Zone where fishing is prohibited. Any operator worth using will already know the boundaries. Ask anyway.

What we could not confirm

Two things, and we would rather write them down than fill the gaps. We could not establish what happened to the hull of the storage tanker Fiona Shell, sunk in the harbour in the September 1941 attack, so we are not going to tell you she was salvaged and we are not going to tell you she is still there. We also found no published blanket rule on recreational diving inside the commercial port area. The Gibraltar Port Authority's local notices to mariners are the place that would say so, and the bunkering traffic alone is a good reason to assume the answer is no.

Published dimensions for the Camp Bay barges also disagree between sources by several metres, which is normal for wrecks nobody has surveyed recently. Treat any figure on a dive site page, including the ones in our table, as approximate. The official heritage record for the 482 is the closest thing to an authority.

Getting to the water from the north end

Gibraltar is about 5 km long, which sounds convenient until you notice that every dive site listed above is at the southern or western end and most visitors sleep at the northern one. Camp Bay, Rosia and the South Mole are all a short drive down the west side. Buses run that way to Rosia and Europa Point, though route numbers change often enough that we will not quote one. Check the current timetable rather than an old blog post.

Victory Suites is at the northern end, on Devils Tower Road, roughly ten minutes on foot from the Spanish frontier and three minutes from the airport. That geography is a genuine advantage if you are driving down from Spain with kit in the boot, and a mild nuisance if you want to walk to a shore dive. Every one of our 100+ apartments has a full kitchen and room to hang wet kit somewhere other than a hotel bathroom, which anyone who has tried to dry 7 mm neoprene over a towel rail will appreciate. Book direct or through any of the 300+ booking channels we list on, and message us if you are diving so we can point you at the right end of the Rock. If you are here for the water rather than the Rock, our guide to the beaches and watersports is the companion piece to this one.