Where to watch whales and dolphins: the best places in the world

Where to see each whale and dolphin species

Looking for a sperm whale? Head for the Azores or Dominica. A killer whale? Norway, Vancouver Island or Punta Norte. A blue whale? Sri Lanka, Monterey or the Saguenay. This page lists the best places in the world to watch whales and dolphins, species by species, with the season for each site.

Planning a whale watching trip

Before setting off: see the annual watching calendar, the directory of HQWW operators, the map of cetaceans in France and the marine sanctuaries worldwide.

Why whales gather in these places

The best places to watch whales coincide with areas of high primary productivity (upwellings, thermal fronts, continental shelves) and substantial survey effort. Monterey Bay and Hervey Bay (Australia), the Pelagos sanctuary in the Mediterranean, the San Juan archipelago in Washington State, Kaikoura in New Zealand and the Valdés peninsula in Argentina are among the major whale watching destinations.

The HQWW label (High Quality Whale Watching) run by ACCOBAMS in the Mediterranean, the World Cetacean Alliance and Whale SENSE (NOAA) certify responsible operators. Good approach practice (a minimum distance of 100 m, reduced speed, limited watching time) limits behavioural disturbance and the risk of collision with propellers.

The most reliable destinations, region by region

Europe. The Azores are the only place in Europe where sperm whales are seen all year round, and Pico also receives blue whales on migration from March to June. Iceland (Húsavík, Reykjavík) offers humpback whales and common minke whales from June to August. In Norway, Tromsø and Skjervøy concentrate the killer whales that follow the herring from November to January, a winter and polar-night observation. In the Mediterranean, the Pelagos sanctuary gives the fin whale from May to October.

The Americas. Mexican Baja California is the only place in the world where grey whale calves come into contact with boats, from January to April. Monterey Bay and the Saguenay-St Lawrence give the blue whale in summer, Churchill in Manitoba up to sixty thousand belugas in July and August, and Punta Norte in Patagonia the only site in the world where killer whales strand deliberately to hunt seals.

Elsewhere. Sri Lanka holds the only known non-migratory blue whale population, visible from Mirissa and Trincomalee. Kaikoura, in New Zealand, reports a 95% success rate on the sperm whale thanks to a submarine canyon that almost touches the coast. Only two countries allow regulated swimming with large cetaceans: Dominica with sperm whales and Tonga with humpback whales, from July to October.

The Capbreton Canyon: watching whales a few kilometres from the beach

One French site deserves a note of its own. The Capbreton Canyon, in the Landes, is a submarine canyon whose head opens a few hundred metres from the shore. Where the Landes coast shelves gently, the canyon cuts into the continental shelf and brings deep water up against the beach. On the SRTM15+ bathymetric grid, the 100 metre contour is crossed 3.9 km from Capbreton beach and the 200 metre contour at 6.3 km. Ten kilometres out, on the axis of the canyon off Hossegor, the bottom lies at 253 metres; at the same distance from the shore it is at 54 metres off Mimizan and 27 metres off Lacanau. Five to ten times deeper, at an equal distance from the sand.

The consequence can be read in the sightings. Querying GBIF over five rectangles of the same dimensions along this coast, keeping only human observations, the canyon rectangle returns 22 cetacean species. The three rectangles placed on the open shelf, off Mimizan, Arcachon and the Gironde, return 14 each. The neighbouring rectangle covering the Basque coast and the Cantabrian corniche, under the influence of the same canyon network, returns 19, and does so with four times fewer sightings: so it is not simply that more people are looking.

What this gap means exactly. It rests entirely on the rare species. Counting only the species seen at least ten times, the canyon musters 12 and the shelf 13: the ordinary fauna is the same everywhere, common dolphin, harbour porpoise, striped dolphin, common bottlenose dolphin, pilot whale. The canyon does not, then, gather more animals; it brings rarities within reach of the coast. Eight species have been reported in the canyon rectangle and in none of the three shelf rectangles: the humpback whale (6 reports), Blainville’s beaked whale (4), the false killer whale (2), the short-finned pilot whale (2), then the blue whale, True’s beaked whale, the Atlantic white-sided dolphin and the white-beaked dolphin, one report each. These numbers say exactly what they are: passages, not an established presence.

The canyon’s signature is the deep divers. Seven species that normally live beyond the slope are documented there: Cuvier’s beaked whale (97 reports), Sowerby’s beaked whale (52), the sperm whale (48), the pygmy sperm whale (30), then Blainville’s beaked whale, the northern bottlenose whale and True’s beaked whale. Four beaked whales in a rectangle that touches the beach: that is what a canyon reaching in towards the shore produces.

Trips leave from Capbreton, Hendaye and Saint-Jean-de-Luz, mainly from June to October; the directory of whale watching operators and associations lists those working on this coast and the labels they are bound by. Two caveats on use: the bathymetric grid used here has a grid cell of fifteen arc seconds, about 460 metres, which smooths out a narrow canyon, and the real depths along the axis are probably greater. And the number of sightings also measures survey effort, which is substantial on this coast. It is the comparison between rectangles of the same size, and not the raw figure, that holds.