The sardine tornado and the turtle wall — a 10-million-fish shoal that spins in permanent formation 20m from shore, plus one of the best wall dives in Southeast Asia
Moalboal is a small municipality on the southwestern coast of Cebu island in the Philippines — 89km south of Cebu City on the Trans-Central Highway, on a stretch of coast backed by the Cebu mountain range and facing the Tañon Strait (the narrow strait between Cebu and Negros island). Moalboal's dive reputation rests on two distinct phenomena: the sardine shoal (a permanent colony of approximately 10 million Sardinella lemuru sardines — the 'sardine tornado', a dense spinning cylinder of fish that occupies a fixed territory about 20m from the shore, around the northern point of the Panagsama b…
Moalboal and the southwestern Cebu coast were part of the Maginlaya kingdom before Spanish contact — the region was converted to Catholicism in the early colonial period (Cebu was the first Spanish settlement in the Philippines, 1565) but the fishing communities continued their traditional livelihood. The sardine shoal is believed to have been present on this particular section of coast for at least several decades — it appeared in dive reports from the early 1980s when the Panagsama dive industry began to develop. The Tañon Strait was declared a Protected Seascape in 1998; the protection has…