Pointe Belmard

A northern site, inside a marine park of forty-seven thousand square kilometres

The register of Martinique sites writes it Pointe Bellemare, at number 36, between Vétiver, for which we have a page under the name Caye Vétiver, and Fond Lahaye.

Our own records write it Pointe Belmard, pointe belmare, Pointe Bellemare and Pte Bellemare, and also carry a neighbouring Fond Belmard. The Case-Pilote diving club describes a Fond Bellemare running from the surface to fifteen metres, over rock and sand, open to every level.

Where exactly you are diving

Since 2017, all these waters lie inside the Martinique Marine Nature Park, created by decree on 5 May 2017. It is the tenth French marine nature park, and the second largest after Mayotte, at forty-seven thousand three hundred and forty square kilometres.

In other words, the protected area is more than forty times the size of the island itself. This is not a reserve you enter through a gate: it is the normal setting of every one of our outings.

What it protects

Three ecosystems that hold each other up: mangroves, seagrass beds and coral reefs, with forty-seven recorded coral species.

And what lives in them: more than three hundred coastal fish species, twenty-one cetacean species, five sea turtle species and twenty-five seabird species.

What it asks of you

A park does not forbid you from coming, it frames how you come. You look, you take nothing, you feed no animal, and you keep your distance from turtles like the one in the photograph: they are entitled to get on with their day without us.

What level you need here