Dennis Bakhuis

Dive site · sea · Gozo and Malta

🇲🇹 The Inland Sea, Dwejra

Dwejra, Gozo, Malta

A shallow lagoon behind the cliffs, joined to the open Mediterranean by an eighty-metre tunnel through solid rock — and you swim out through it into 50 m of blue.

Dives here
1
Deepest
28.1 m
Water
salt
First · last
2011

Revision 2 · changed 18 Oct 2026

History
  1. r2 18 Oct 2026 Photo size matches the file · Dennis Bakhuis
  2. r1 10 Oct 2026 Imported from the personal log · Dennis Bakhuis

Site data © divelog-sites contributors (ODbL), descriptions and maps CC BY-SA 4.0 · 53edcaf

1 map

Lagoon 1–2 mInland SeaTunnel, about 80 mWall to 50 m+Usual route · 626 mEntry (slipway)↓0 mTunnel mouth↓3 mRock↓5 mRock↓9 mRock↓15 mTunnel exit, pebble floor↓26 mBlue HoleWhale CaveN50 m
  • Entry / exit
  • Point of interest
  • Shoreline
  • Dive path
  • Wall / drop-off
  • Shallows
  • Depth
Site map · 7 objects · 1 path · max 26 m

The Inland Sea at Dwejra: the lagoon, the tunnel through the cliff to the open sea and the wall outside. The lagoon, coastline and tunnel line are from OpenStreetMap; tunnel depths (3 m at the lagoon to 26 m at the exit, rock steps at 5, 9 and 15 m) and the routes left towards the Blue Hole or right towards Whale Cave and Ta' Barba follow the St Andrew's Divers Cove (gozodive.com) and maltadives.com descriptions. Tunnel width, the slipway position and the wall line are approximate; Whale Cave is placed from maltadives.com's approximate coordinates.

Map © divelog-sites contributors, CC BY-SA 4.0 · 53edcaf

The Inland Sea at Dwejra is a small lagoon, a few hundred metres across and only a few metres deep, sitting behind the coastal cliffs with a shingle beach and fishing boats pulled up on it. It is connected to the sea by a single tunnel through the cliff, about 80 m long and just wide enough for a small boat.

That tunnel is the dive. You kit up on the beach, swim or get ferried into the tunnel, and go through it at 5–10 m in gloom with rock on both sides and above. Then it opens, and you come out at about 26 m onto a sheer wall that drops past 50 m, with the whole Mediterranean in front of you. The contrast between the two halves of the dive is the reason it is on every list of the best dives in Europe.

In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century sources the tunnel mouth itself was called Tieqa Żerqa — the blue window — a name the natural arch up the coast later inherited.

Dived 5 August 2011 to 28.1 m.

Image: Mar Interior, isla de Gozo, Malta, 2021-08-22, DD 79.jpg — Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Photos

Dived here with

Kim

Nearby sites

1 dive at The Inland Sea, Dwejra

  1. 5 Aug 2011 with Kim date5 Aug 2011 depth28.1 m time56 min water—

Sources

  • First-hand observation (Dennis Bakhuis)