This underwater sculpture park is helping rewild marine ecosystems. Here’s how

Looking out to sea from Pernera Beach in Cyprus, you would be forgiven for not noticing the resort’s new $1.1 million Museum of Underwater Sculpture Ayia Napa (MUSAN) tourist attraction, which opened in August 2021. It sits beyond the beach on the seafloor, 8 to 10 metres beneath the waves of the Mediterranean sea.

Here, art installation meets environmental conservation, bringing to life an underwater world of 93 exhibits each carved using inert ph-neutral material, which is designed to attract marine life.

The sculptures – weighing up to 13 tonnes – were lowered to the seabed by crane and positioned at different depths. Over time, the installation should evolve into a haven for different forms of marine flora and fauna, attracting microorganisms that fish and other species feed on to boost the area’s biodiversity.

As well as a home for sea creatures, this underwater gallery is made for scuba divers, snorkellers and freedivers to explore, gliding in and out of giant spiky trees, imposing plantlife, floating foliage and various representations of people – interacting with objects, staring into the oceanic void, even kids playing hide and seek.

The sunken forest explores the relationship between humans and nature, emphasizing the concepts of rewilding the world and reforesting areas of barren habitat, the artist Jason deCaires Taylor told CNN Travel. It incorporates numerous references to climate change and habitat loss and pollution, which Taylor sees as the defining issues of our era.

“They’re designed to sort of let natural growth settle on the substrate,” he told CNN Travel. “After five or six days, I could already see a thin film of algae on each of the heads of the sculptures, which have these quite complex habitat areas, and they were already full with little juvenile fish.”

In 2006, Taylor established the world’s first underwater sculpture site in Grenada, West Indies.

This was followed by a more ambitious project in the waters surrounding Cancún off the coast of Mexico. The Museo Subacuático de Arte (MUSA) features more than 500 submerged sculptures installed across a marine park covering 420 square metres of seabed, which actively promotes coral habitat and reef recovery.

“It is named a museum for a simple reason,” Taylor said. “Every day we dredge, pollute and overfish our oceans, while museums are places of preservation, of conservation, and of education. They are places where we keep objects that have great value to us. Our oceans are sacred.”

Factors like climate change and overfishing have left around a third of ocean dwellers like shark and ray populations, amphibians and crustaceans under threat, and endangered more than a third of the planet’s coral reefs, according to International Union for Conservation of Nature estimates.

While Taylor has embedded his ‘living’ sculptures at various sites around the world to help rebuild local marine ecosystems, action on climate change is urgently needed on a global scale to turn the tide and protect the planet’s seas and oceans.