The First Undersea Art Museum In The Atlantic: Swim Through Hundreds Of Life-Size Sculptures

Featured on forbes.com

More than 400 life-like sculptures rest eerily on the ocean floor, recently installed off the coast of Lanzarote, one of Spain’s Canary Islands, to create the Museo Atlantico, the first underwater art museum in the Atlantic Ocean.

Just opened to the scuba diving-and-snorkeling public, the fantastic collection is the initial phase of a project created by the renowned, visionary British underwater sculptor Jason deCaires Taylor, for whom the ocean floors have become an exhibition space to house his enigmatic sculptures — commentaries on the transience of human existence, our relationship with nature, the power of the sea and its capacity for regeneration.

His life-size stone figures, attached to the sea floor with a special cement mix that draws ocean life to develop around them, are “tales of the world, reflections on climate change and habitat loss based on real-life characters, their stories and their relationship with the environment,” as Taylor explains in a TED talk. 

Born in 1974 to an English father and Guyanese mother, Taylor grew up in Europe and Asia, and spent much of his childhood exploring the coral reefs of Malaysia. After graduating from the London Institute of Arts in 1998, he became a diving instructor and underwater naturalist. He’s also an award-winning underwater photographer, known for dramatic images that capture the metamorphosing effects of the ocean on his evolving sculptures.

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