---
name: "Submarine Safari"
subtitle: "A submarine that takes 44 people thirty metres under Tenerife"
date: 2026-07-28
category: places
topics: [travel-and-places, outdoors-and-nature]
tags: [submarine, tenerife, underwater, canary-islands]
link: "https://www.submarinesafaris.com/"
linkText: "submarinesafaris.com"
description: "One of the few passenger submarines open to the public: 44 seats behind 22 view ports, thirty metres down off Amarilla Marina in Tenerife, past two wrecks on the seabed."
source: "Atlas Obscura"
fromFind: "submarine-safari-tenerife"
---

import { Image } from 'astro:assets';
import hero from './hero.jpg';

<Image src={hero} alt="The yellow conning tower of the submarine Sub Fun Cinco at its mooring in Amarilla Marina, carrying the Submarine Safaris roundel and the registration ANTWERPEN O 6260, with a passenger stepping down the gangway beside it." />

> Almost every "submarine tour" in the world is a boat with a glass floor. This one submerges, with you inside it, thirty metres down.

The distinction matters more than the brochures let on. A semi-submersible keeps its hull at the surface and drops a viewing gallery a metre or two under; you are looking through a window at the top of the water column. Submarine Safaris operates an actual submarine — it dives, it sits on the seabed, and it comes back up. There are 44 seats and 22 view ports, one each side of every row, which is the detail that decides whether an hour underwater is worth the fare: nobody is looking over a shoulder.

The boat is called *Sub Fun Cinco*, and it runs out of Amarilla Marina at San Miguel de Abona on Tenerife's southern coast, as it has since 2007; the company's other submarine works from Puerto Calero in Lanzarote, where these hulls first went into service. The registration painted under the name reads ANTWERPEN O 6260 — a Belgian port of registry on a Spanish tourist attraction, which is the sort of detail that tells you this is a classed vessel with paperwork rather than an attraction with a periscope. The account that surfaced it puts the build in Finland in the 1990s; the operator does not say, so take the yard as reported rather than confirmed.

The dive itself takes in two wrecks lying on the bottom and the schools of fish that have made homes of them. Partway through, the submarine settles on the seabed and passengers are invited forward to photograph the pilots at the controls, which is a small piece of theatre and an entirely good one — the cockpit of a working submarine is not a thing most people will otherwise stand in. Commentary runs in several languages; you leave with a dive certificate.

Two honest notes, both from checking the operator's own pages against the account that surfaced it. Thirty metres is the depth the company advertises, and it is the figure to plan on — the deeper hull ratings quoted secondhand are not something Submarine Safaris publishes. And the rays: a visitor's account describes them coming to the ports for the divers' bubbles, which is a lovely image and a plausible one, but the operator promises wrecks and fish, not a specific animal. Go for the descent and the seabed. If something with wings turns up at the glass, treat it as the day being generous.
