Gato Island

Gato Island is a small, rocky islet about 15 kilometers northwest of Malapascua, under the municipality of Daanbantayan, and it’s one of the more tightly protected dive sites in North Cebu waters. The island’s defining feature is a 30-meter tunnel that runs straight through it, connecting one side to the other underwater, wide enough for divers to swim through in single file past resident crabs, lobsters, and cardinal fish. It’s also a longstanding sea snake breeding ground, and that combination — a swim-through tunnel and a resident snake population — is what put Gato on the dive map decades before thresher sharks made Malapascua itself famous.

The sea snake connection has a specific, documented history behind it. Japanese fishermen are recorded as having discovered the breeding grounds here in 1933, and local accounts describe them teaching Daanbantayan fishing communities how to catch the snakes safely, process the skins, and treat bites — practical knowledge that got passed down well beyond the original trade it supported. That local expertise likely factored into the island later being placed under formal protection: Gato was designated a sea snake and fish sanctuary in 1997, and in 2001 the protected zone was expanded to a two-nautical-mile radius managed by the municipal government. The same year the sanctuary was first declared, Cebu State College of Science and Technology also set up a research station on the island with underwater equipment, giving Gato a scientific footprint alongside its dive-tourism one.

Sea snake breeding season runs roughly March through September, which means visitors diving outside those months will see fewer of them and more of the tunnel’s other residents — including the whitetip reef sharks that rest in its deeper recesses during the day. None of this is a casual snorkel-off-the-beach stop; access is by guided boat trip, typically bundled with the Monad Shoal and Kimud Shoal thresher shark dives out of Malapascua as part of what local dive shops informally call the area’s trio of signature sites.

• Navigate the tunnel that cuts through the island’s core — a swim-through, not a cave dive, but still one for a guide who knows the current on a given day.
• Expect to encounter sea snakes (heaviest March through September), nudibranchs, and whitetip reef sharks resting in the tunnel’s shadier stretches.
• Book with an experienced local boat operator out of Malapascua or Daanbantayan; currents around the island shift with tide, and the tunnel entry points aren’t obvious from the surface.
• Respect the sanctuary rules — no touching or collecting — since the protected zone here has been in place since 1997 specifically to keep the snake population and reef intact.
• [FACT NEEDED: current entry permit or sanctuary fee structure for divers visiting Gato Island, if one is charged by the Daanbantayan municipal government]

The sanctuary hasn’t shut fishing out of the area entirely, but it has shifted more of Daanbantayan’s coastal income toward guided diving over the past few decades — boatmen, dive guides, and gear rental jobs that didn’t exist before Gato and its neighboring shoals became a fixture on Philippine dive itineraries. It’s a small-scale version of the same trade-off playing out across North Cebu’s protected reefs: less open fishing water, more income tied to keeping the reef worth diving in the first place.

Explore More in North Cebu Mainland

• Little Batanes of Cebu
• Kota Beach
• Capitancillo Lighthouse