A 60-year-old man has died while scuba diving at Dorothea Quarry, a disused slate quarry used as a dive site located in the Nantlle Valley of Gwynedd, North Wales.
Police were called to the quarry on Saturday, 31 May after receiving reports of a diver in distress, but the man – who has not been named – had already died at the scene.
A spokesperson for the North Wales Police said: ‘Police attended the Dorothea Quarry area of Caernarfon following a report of an incident involving a diver.
‘Emergency services attended the location which sadly resulted in the body of a 60-year-old man being recovered.
‘The man’s family have been informed and the death is not being treated as suspicious.’
Dorothea Quarry – known locally as ‘Dotty’ – has been a popular dive spot since the early ’90s, but diving was conducted there against the wishes of the owner at the time and there were at least 25 deaths at the site between 1994 and 2014.
The quarry was fenced off and no facilities were available on site, and although not all the fatalites were divers, the British Sub-Aqua Club, BSAC, warned people against diving in the quarry after a 41-year-old man and died and two of his friends were seriously injured there in 2014.
The quarry reopened to technical divers in 2021 under the management of the North Wales Technical Divers Club (NWTD), which now holds an exclusive license from the landowner to conduct technical dives in Dotty, with the approval of BSAC.
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