Go Niche

HERE’S ANOTHER thing to add to the travel wish-list: the Cancun underwater museum project, MUSA, a series of 400 life-sized statues created to be viewed by divers off the Mexican coast.

It’s the creation of English artist Jason deCaires Taylor, who previously created a smaller underwater sculpture park off the island of Grenada. Not only are his creations works of art but they will, in time, become works of nature, too, as they are colonised by marine life.

The artist is also a dive instructor, and his main aim with the project is conservation. The sculpture park is close to Mexico’s Manchones coral reef, one the country’s biggest dive sites but one which has suffered in recent years from hurricane damage.

Each of his sculptures, all of which are based on local people, is made from ph-neutral clay, to promote the growth of coral reef and marine life, giving the existing reef a chance to recuperate.

Installations include Man on Fire, a figure of a local fisherman with special holes drilled for the planting of fire coral; The Gardener of Hope,just 4ft below water, a girl lying in a garden surrounded by jars of living coral; and T he Dream Collector, an underwater filing cabinet – with attendant – holding hundreds of messages in bottles for future generations to discover.

The nearby reef attracts more than 750,000 visitors each year. The idea of the sculpture park is also to help draw people away from it, reliving the tourist pressure it is under.

It’s the kind of pressure our Atlantic dive schools would love to be under. Wonder how much it would cost to have him sink some statues over here?

- musacancun.com