Stingray City is a series of shallow sandbars found in the North Sound of Grand Cayman

Grand Cayman

Grand Cayman is the largest of the three Cayman Islands and the location of the nation's capital, George Town. In relation to the other two Cayman Islands, it is approximately 75 miles southwest of Little Cayman and 90 miles southwest of Cayman Brac.-Geography:Grand Cayman encompasses 76% of...

, Cayman Islands

Cayman Islands

The Cayman Islands is a British Overseas Territory and overseas territory of the European Union located in the western Caribbean Sea. The territory comprises the three islands of Grand Cayman, Cayman Brac, and Little Cayman, located south of Cuba and northwest of Jamaica...

. It is a tourist attraction, where southern stingray

Southern stingray

The southern stingray, Dasyatis americana, is a stingray of the family Dasyatidae found in tropical and subtropical waters of the Western Atlantic Ocean from New Jersey to Brazil. It has a flat, diamond-shaped disc, with a mud brown, olive, and grey dorsal surface and white underbelly...

s are found in abundance and visitors can pet and interact with the animals.

Location

Stingray City is in the shallow waters of the northwest corner of Grand Cayman's North Sound. It is just inside a natural channel that passes through the barrier reef

Barrier reef

Barrier reef may refer to:*a kind of coral reef*the Great Barrier Reef in Australia*the Mesoamerican Barrier Reef System*the Belize Barrier Reef*the New Caledonia Barrier Reef*Barrier Reef , an Australian television series...

 and consists of a string of sandbars crossing the North Sound from Morgan Harbour to Rum Point.

History

It may be that stingrays began gathering in the area decades ago when fisherman returned from an excursion, navigated behind a reef into the sound, and cleaned their fish in the calm water of the shallows and sandbar area. The fish guts were thrown overboard and the stingrays eventually congregated to feast on the discarded guts. Soon the stingrays associated the sound of a boat engine with food. As this practice turned into a tradition, divers realized that the stingrays could be fed by hand.

Today, tour and excursion boats, along with private watercraft, gather at Stingray City in large numbers. Passengers disembark and enter the chest-high water to interact with the stingrays. The boats' proprietors bring along with them pails of chunked-up squid meat, which they dispense by hand to the animals, thus attracting dozens of the creatures to the feeding spot.

Getting there

Each method involves a short boat ride to the sandbar area at the North Sound.

• A snorkeling
  Snorkeling
  Snorkeling is the practice of swimming on or through a body of water while equipped with a diving mask, a shaped tube called a snorkel, and usually swimfins. In cooler waters, a wetsuit may also be worn...
  
   trip, which normally occurs in the heart of the sandbar where the water is only 3 to 5 feet deep.
• As a scuba diver
  Scuba diving
  Scuba diving is a form of underwater diving in which a diver uses a scuba set to breathe underwater....
  
  . Dive groups consist of ten to twenty divers, wearing no fins as they may hurt the congregating stingrays. The divers are over-weighted, which keeps them on the bottom. The dive master swims between divers dispersing diced squid and fish pieces. Stingrays quickly surround them.
• Using a glass bottom boat
  Glass bottom boat
  A glass bottom boat is a boat with sections of glass, or other suitable transparent material, below the waterline allowing passengers to observe the underwater environment from within the boat. The view through the glass bottom is better than simply looking into the water from above, because one...
  
  , an alternative if the weather is too windy for snorkeling.
• Riding a jet ski
  Jet ski
  Jet Ski is the brand name of a personal watercraft manufactured by Kawasaki Heavy Industries. The name is sometimes mistakenly used by those unfamiliar with the personal watercraft industry to refer to any type of personal watercraft; however, the name is a valid trademark registered with the...
  
  , and then tying it to another jet ski that is anchored on the ocean floor.