Isla Guadalupe is a steep volcanic island in the Pacific, 240 kilometres off the Baja coast, with a small naval detachment and an enormous colony of northern elephant seals and Guadalupe fur seals. The seals are why the great whites come.
From the late 1990s the island became the premier place in the world to see them: water clarity of 30 to 40 metres, far better than South Africa or South Australia, and sharks that approached cages predictably between July and November. Liveaboards ran from Ensenada.
That has stopped. In 2022 Mexico suspended shark-diving permits at the island, citing damage to the biosphere reserve and incidents involving operators baiting sharks into cages. Despite periodic reports of a reopening, the ban has held, and operators advertising Guadalupe trips are generally selling something else or trading on an expired permit. Verify before you pay.
The island is also an ecological restoration story. Feral goats, introduced in the nineteenth century, stripped it almost bare; their removal was completed in 2007, and the endemic cypress and pine forests have been coming back since.