Favorite Vieques beaches

We spent as much time as possible exploring the beaches on Vieques. As we wrote before, the beaches are stunningly beautiful, especially if you want to go hang out on the beach, sipping beer or margaritas, reading and/or sunbathing. Beyond the beer and margaritas, our idea of going to the beach is to DO something - fly kites, ride horses, run dogs, snorkel or SCUBA dive. Since we didn't take kites, horses or dogs and all the SCUBA trips were booked, that left snorkeling. And Snorkel we did! We explored the waters at every beach we went to.

I think our favorite "hang out" beach, the most beautiful, was Media Luna (Half Moon). Like most of the beaches we visited, Media Luna was not a great snorkeling beach. We are somewhat spoiled by the reefs around us here at home in Isabela. Despite the damage that's been done to them, the reefs are alive and have a lot of varied sealife to see. In contrast, we found few reefs on Vieques. There is a lot of seagrass and while there is a lot of life in the grass, it is much harder to see.


Some of the areas we snorkeled had this weird other-worldly almost post-apocalyptic feel to them. White sand covered everything and the coral - what there was of it - seemed strangled. The sand was all stirred up so visibility was limited.


One notable exception was Green beach on the far west end of the island. This is the one place we snorkeled over what we considered healthy reef. It was also the clearest water with the best visibility of any of the beaches. We didn't see it but another couple snorkeling on another part of the reef saw a spotted eagle ray.


Far and away our favorite snorkeling encounter was with this guy at Blue Beach, also known as La Chiva.


This guy was not at all shy and didn't mind swimming with company. We swam with him for 10 minutes or so.


The only beach we wanted to see but didn't was Navio. Navio is down a dirt road beyond Media Luna. The road was muddy and had water-filled holes. We decided that was not the best place for our little scooter.

We also didn't do the bioluminescent bay tour. You have to have guide for these tours to protect the bay and all the operators were booked when we were there.

Sounds like reasons to go back to me!