Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Yorkshire Evening Post, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. But the foreign-looking constructs are really a nursery of sorts, housing precious fragments of growing coral that have helped pull the marine national park back from the brink of near-total destruction. In 2001, the Central American country of Belize - long favoured as a haven for divers and snorkelers from across the globe - was hit hard by Hurricane Iris.
Its magnificent reefs were largely reduced to rubble, just one of the storm’s many victims. Advertisement Advertisement Today however, it’s a vibrant, thriving ecosystem once more. On the caye, surrounded by carefully fenced-off turtle nests, a spectacular white osprey surveys his hunting ground from on high.
And once you enter the delightfully warm sea, you’re instantly surrounded by life. A shy nurse shark takes cover under a stony shelf. Fish of every size and hue go about their business in their colourful home - barely paying passing snorkelers any mind as they make their way through clouds of tiny, harmless jellyfish that evoke a sense of paddling through pudding.
It’s largely thanks to a grassroots non-profit on the Placencia Peninsula called Fragments of Hope, which, after years of research and work ‘reforesting’ the region’s reefs, has helped to restore them to a semblance of their former glo.