Icacos Island Map: Location, Shores and Landing Points

Cayo Icacos location: how the cay sits off Fajardo

Find Fajardo's northeastern corner on the map above, then look offshore. Reserve water starts about 1.5 nautical miles out from that coast, centred near 18°23'50" N, 65°36'15" W, and Icacos is the largest piece of dry land inside it, roughly 1.5 miles from Puerto Rico's east coast. The water leg of your day runs 15 to 20 minutes.

The cay belongs to the Reserva Natural Arrecifes de La Cordillera, about 29,653 acres or 120 km² of protected area that is mostly submerged. Designation was recommended in 1978 and made formal on 2 January 1980 under the island's Coastal Zone Management Plan, and administration passed to the Departamento de Recursos Naturales y Ambientales in 1991. No boat company owns or runs the place.

The land is modest against all that water: about 0.659 km², or 0.254 sq mi, still enough to make Icacos the largest uninhabited cay in the chain. No public ferry serves any of these cays. Boats leave from the Fajardo and Ceiba coast or from the marinas, so what this map should settle for you is which dock you drive to.

Icacos island map, read shore by shore

The cay reads as a long low shape lying off the coast, with sandy beach recorded on two sides: the south coast and the north coast. The north shore is the windward one, open to the weather coming in. The southwest side is screened by the cays themselves, and DRNA's own field work describes the waters there as calm, out of the wind and the waves. Visitor landings and the water-taxi zone all sit on that sheltered face.

DRNA's 2017 study divided the water around Icacos into four use zones, and they are the closest thing to a published map legend for the place:

Between the north and south beaches the ground is scrub: palm trees, sea grape bushes and rocky points where the sand gives out, with nothing built and no permanent shade structure anywhere. The small rocky islets ringing Icacos and nearby Cayo Ratones are listed among the sensitive habitats set aside for seabird nesting, so look at them from the water.

Walk south and the ground tells you about the cay's working past. A limestone quarry once operated on the southern part of Icacos, served by a short railway down to the pier, and the ruins hikers notice today come from that operation. They are the only man-made landmark on the island, and the easiest thing to orient by once you are away from the landing beach.

• Zone A, northwest of the cay: boaters
• Zone B, southwest: bathers and the water taxis that bring them, the sector with beach frontage
• Zone C, south: catamarans and the southern reef
• Zone D: the mooring buoys and the reef beside them

Where boats anchor and where you step ashore

Day visitors come ashore on the southwest strip, Zone B, the sector DRNA assigns to bathers and water taxis and the one its beach list records as Playa Cayo Icacos, 220 metres long. Whatever hull you arrive on, that sand is where the passengers end up. Private boats tend to sit off the northwest side in Zone A, clear of the swimming water.

The snorkel stop is a separate position on the map from the beach. Two shallow reefs are in use: the flat reef off the south coast, where catamaran excursions begin, and the reef beside the mooring buoys, where DRNA counted more fish and more coral. Both are reached from the boat rather than by swimming off the sand, and the usual stop sits in about 18 to 25 ft of water. On the shallow reef the tour boats use, the coral includes endangered staghorn, Acropora cervicornis.

Mooring buoys exist at the reserve's busiest sites, Cayo Icacos among them, along with Cayo Lobo, Cayo Diablo, Isla Palomino and Isla de Palominito. They went in because anchoring had stripped bare whole patches of the seagrass meadows around the cays. Keep your hands off the coral, your fins up and away from it, and your feet off the reef entirely: DRNA's observers logged at least one damaging act by 33 to 34% of snorkellers at Icacos, most often disturbing an organism, kicking the reef with fins or touching coral.

Getting around on foot once you land

Nothing is built on Icacos, so there is nothing to navigate by. Not one restroom, no tap of drinking water, no food service, no bins and nobody on lifeguard duty. There is no signage and no permanent shade structure either. Your reference points are the rocky points at either end of the sand, the line of sea grape and palms behind the beach, your own boat, and the quarry rubble at the southern end. The zone letters belong to a water-use scheme in a government report and appear nowhere on the beach.

Walking is the only way to move around, and at roughly 0.659 km² the distances are short: from the southwest landing you can follow the sand to the rocky points, cut through the scrub to the north-coast beach, or head down to the southern end for the ruins. The beach itself is not a fixed shape. Sand accumulation on Icacos varies through the year with the littoral currents, so the width and profile you find in February will not match August, and sargassum builds from spring into summer with a peak in June or July and least of all in winter.

Time your loop of the island against your return slot, because hunting and overnight camping are both off-limits on the cay and the visit has to finish the same day. Carry out everything you bring, since nobody collects rubbish here. Seabird breeding in the reserve runs March to September, and the management plan proposes closing cays with colonies to visitors during that window, one more reason to keep to the beaches. Nobody is watching the water from the shore, so you swim and snorkel at your own risk.

The neighbouring cays in the chain

The reserve's draft management plan lists the cays and islets in sequence from west to east, which is the order you see them from a boat heading out of Fajardo:

Isla Palominito lies south of the main chain, east of the Fajardo roadstead. Cayo Lobos and Isla de Palominos are privately owned and their land is excluded from the reserve's protected area, although the water around them is included. The management plan keeps public landing to four places in the whole chain, Cayo Icacos, the beach of Lobos, Cayo Diablo and Palominitos, which leaves everything else on that list as something you look at from the boat.

Trips differ in how much of the chain they show you. The self-drive mini boat tour on this site runs as a guided convoy through the islands and cays with snorkelling on the reserve's reefs, so you see more of the string on the way out and back. The private charter on this site is the one that lets you choose between Icacos and Palominos for the day, and that is the choice to make if a second cay matters more to you than hours on one beach.

• Las Cucarachas
• Los Farallones
• Cayo Icacos
• Cayo Ratones
• La Blanquilla
• Cayo Diablo
• plus the Hermanos and Barriles reefs

Which departure point is closest to you

Departure points are not interchangeable, and each one sends you to a different gate and a different check-in. From San Juan or the airport area, allow about 60 minutes of driving to the Fajardo coast whichever dock you are heading for, then 15 to 20 minutes of water. The cays themselves take the wind and the waves off the use zones, which is why that short leg rarely feels rough.

What the map leaves you is the choice of boat. Pick the departure point you can actually reach on time, book a trip with a fixed check-in, and keep the 24-hour refund window in reserve if the forecast looks unsettled.

Questions people ask

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