From Vacation to Restoration: Coral Gardening with Sandals Resorts

Your ears hear the magical words at the entrance: Welcome to Sandals. Welcome home. Your eyes see gloriously unspoken greetings out back: Welcome to the Caribbean. Welcome to the most beautiful ocean on Earth.

Come closer. Step past the pool, across the feathery-soft beach, and keep walking into the comfort of the prettiest water you’ve ever seen. On the surface, it’s turquoise, emerald, and shades of blue you didn’t know existed.

Oh, you just wait. You haven’t seen the most spectacular sights under the surface yet. Many of the 20,000 people who work at Sandals Resorts across the Caribbean have seen them. They grew up in this water, swimming, fishing, and diving. They understand how the ocean and its reefs connect people to the islands, to the environment, and to life.

It is a part of every person who calls the Caribbean “home.”

And now, a timeless legacy for Sandals guests who participate in Reef Rescue and Coral Nursery Transplanting dives. These PADI experiences are curated for Sandals.

Think of it. How many travelers can legitimately say they established a living, breathing legacy in the Caribbean Sea, while on vacation? It's one thing to soak in the sea and take pictures of it, but the affection reaches a deeper level when you are actually in the sea for the purpose of making it healthier and prettier for generations to come.

Yet this is exactly what Sandals guests are doing on five Caribbean islands: Saint Lucia, Bahamas, Curaçao, Grenada, and Jamaica. By giving a few hours of vacation time to participate in exclusive coral restoration programs, they’re going home with one of the most engaging first lines to a travel story you can imagine: I became a coral gardener in the Caribbean Sea.

The story of a Sandals coral gardener is a story that will live beyond dinner talk and into perpetuity. Every piece of planted coral will grow into a healthier habitat for marine life. It will protect coastlines and become part of the underwater allure of the Caribbean.

Sandals guests can say, “I had a hand in that.”

“The health of the Caribbean begins with our ocean,” says Sandals Resorts International Executive Chairman Adam Stewart. “And there’s no better way to make a difference than by inviting Sandals guests to be proactive participants.”

At last count, Sandals guests and local underwater gardeners have collaborated to transplant over 37,000 coral fragments through programs led by the Sandals Foundation and its partners. Many guests have arrived at Sandals as novice divers, taken coral restoration speciality courses, and then immersed themselves into an unforgettable gardening experience.

So come closer. Notice the reefs becoming more vibrant, the fish becoming more plentiful, and communities becoming more self-sustainable. Dive into this perpetual cycle of Caribbean goodness. And while you’re at it, build an ever-growing legacy in the ocean.

Saint Lucia

Welcome to the island where the coral nursery transplanting program involving Sandals guests started. Since 2018, more than 16,000 coral fragments have been outplanted just around Saint Lucia. The benefits are impossible to calculate.

“To maximize the impact of this program, we rely on the participation of Sandals guests,” says Newton Eristhee, operations director of the Center for Livelihoods, Ecosystems, Energy, Adaptation, and Resilience (CLEAR).

Guests from all three Sandals resorts on the island — Sandals Halcyon, Sandals Regency La Toc, and Sandals Grande Saint Lucian — learn restoration techniques through the Coral Nursery Transplanting Specialty, a PADI distinctive specialty. Then, together, they all enter the ocean to get their hands wet in the gardens.

“By helping us enhance the reefs,” Eristhee says, “Sandals guests are helping to enhance lives in the Caribbean.”

The enhancing has no end because the first-hand experience powers a cycle known as a “sustainable financing mechanism.” All funds go back into the coral gardening program, allowing the same certified divers who train Sandals guests to train others in Saint Lucia. Coral gardening skills then expand to cover more of the island and ocean. Already, there’s a coral nursery as far south as the iconic Pitons and soon divers in Saint Lucia will launch a Snorkel Trail to showcase how coral fragments transplanted by Sandals guests have flourished into magnificent models of health.

The Bahamas

Colorful reefs have brought notoriety to The Bahamas for centuries, but young forests of coral sprouting near Sandals Royal Bahamian are different, these sit along coral nursery trees off the resort’s coast. They’re a spectacle-in-progress and the result of a new Reef Rescue Network site from the Perry Institute for Marine Sciences, supported by the Sandals Foundation and managed by the men and women of the Sandals Royal Bahamian water sports team.

Resort guests can descend into the ocean alongside members of Sandals’ PADI-trained team and take the new Reef Rescue Diver Specialty Course. During the dives, guests first learn how to maintain coral nurseries before actually transplanting corals from nursery to reef.

The first trees in the nursery, established barely a year ago, are already thriving with hundreds of elkhorn and staghorn coral fragments. As the fragments grow, so does the well-being of the ocean and the legacies of Sandals guests who now have an entirely new place to marvel — perfectly celebrating the 2025 United Nation’s World Oceans Day theme, Wonder: Sustaining What Sustains Us.

Curaçao

With over 70 dive sites spanning the coast of Curaçao, there is endless beauty to explore, and now, thanks to the Sandals Foundation, to preserve and protect. The Sandals Royal Curaçao dive shop team and the Sandals Foundation are collaborating with the BRANCH Coral Foundation and have already distributed five coral trees, each of them budding with 80 fragments of staghorn coral. The goal is to outplant 300 fragments every six months until they cover 100 square meters of reef.

Resort dive team members will be caretakers of the coral fragements, which will eventually equip them to guide resort guests in coral gardening techniques. It’s important to note that the new coral will grow unencumbered, thanks in large part to the Future Goals program. The project, which removes plastic debris from the ocean and its shores, is repurposed into soccer goals for Curaçao’s schools making and distributing over 60 goals over the last three years.

Grenada

More beautification is actively underway at the southern end of the Caribbean Ocean, where people living near [Grenada’s]https://www.sandals.com/grenada/) seashores are becoming coral-gardening ambassadors. Their awareness and skills were elevated when the Sandals Foundation teamed up with the Grenada Coral Reef Foundation to provide much-needed coral gardening equipment.

“Families have lived here for generations, but eyes are just now being opened to the generational importance of reef restoration,” says Deleon Forrester of the Sandals Foundation. “Sharing this practice with our neighbors across the island has made all the difference, they have something very important: community trust. That’s how we can get things done.”

Jamaica

When you come to the original home of Sandals: Jamaica thousands of coral fragments are in some stage of growth off the coast of Boscobel to the north and Whitehouse to the south. The number is constantly growing because divers from the surrounding communities are actively gardening every day.

The reefs have undergone a miraculous transformation since the Sandals Foundation appealed to fishermen in these regions to be the change makers by sharing the benefits of treating the reef as part of a fish sanctuary.

“Before the foundation came, the reef was starting to lose its sparkle” says a fisherman, Terrell, who would become a full-time Sandals Foundation ambassador. “They listened to our concerns as fishermen.”

The water at Boscobel and Whitehouse is now beaming with life.

“It’s because of Sandals,” Terrell says.

And that takes us back to where the best vacation ever continues. You’ve spent a morning tending a coral garden. You’ve made the ocean healthier. And then, happier than you’ve ever been on a trip, you return to your suite with an artful view of the sea and imagine those magical words again: Welcome to the Caribbean.