Coral gardens and nesting turtles — Kenya's most pristine marine national park
Watamu is a small beach village on the Kenyan coast, 105km north of Mombasa, anchored by a Marine National Park that protects some of the healthiest coral reefs in East Africa. The three interconnected bays — Watamu, Blue Lagoon, and Turtle Bay — have white sand beaches and shallow coral gardens accessible by glass-bottomed boat or snorkelling. The park is one of the most important sea turtle nesting sites in Kenya; the local conservation NGO operates turtle monitoring and nest protection programmes. From October to March, whale sharks aggregate in Watamu Bay — one of the world's most reliabl…
Watamu was a small Giriama fishing village before Italian tourists discovered its beaches in the 1960s and the area developed as a low-key alternative to Malindi. The Marine National Park was gazetted in 1968, one of East Africa's earliest marine protected areas. Watamu has maintained a more relaxed, less commercialised character than Malindi despite proximity, partly due to the park's protection and partly because the beach road from Malindi ends here.