Stingray City

Stingray City is located in the shallow waters of the northwest corner of Grand Cayman's North Sound. It's just inside a natural channel which passes through the barrier reef. That's important to know, as it explains not only where Stingray City is, but also why it is.

Stingrays are bottom dwellers who feed primarily on mollusks and crustaceans, for which they dig in the sand, and on the occasional small fish. Stingrays naturally like shallow, sandy bottoms such as that found at this channel because that's where they find their food.
Fisherman used to duck in here, behind the the reef, to find calm water before returning to the dock. Rather than spill their beer and have sharp knives and fish guts flung about the boat while on open water, they naturally waited to return to the sound to clean and fillet their catch. Disposing of the offal was easy, toss it overboard in the shallow water, there's no one out here and the fish will eat it! It was fat city for the rays!

Well, years went by, and eventually some local divers realized that, not only were there were a lot of rays out there but you could get in the water with them and feed them by hand  (Divers will try most anything, given enough time and air!).  Then in 1987, Skin Diver Magazine found out about it, sent Geri Murphy down to do a story on the whole thing and the rest was, as you say it, history!

Now, over ten years later, Stingray City and a second site near Rum Point Channel, called Sandbar, have hit the big time. Known throughout the world, featured on prestigious television documentaries, and seen as underwater advertising backdrops for everything from automobiles to 9v batteries, Stingray City and Sandbar are no longer quite undiscovered.

But for every diver or snorkeler who dares get in that water for their first time this year, with these prehistoric looking creatures lurking just below their toes, the adrenaline still flows and the heart still pumps. It is still a world-class experience.

This is not a penned up, artificial, man-made aquarium setting with captive rays like they setup in the Bahamas in 1995. This is the real thing, this is the real ocean with real animals who are free to come and go as they choose, and they choose to be there because they hope that you might just come down there and feed them. Makes sense, when you think of it, who really wants to have to grub in the sand for a living?