Tamara Adame

Tamara was born and raised in Quintana Roo and grew up in Puerto Morelos, a sleepy fishing village off the Caribbean coast of Mexico. She has spent the majority of her life in, on, or around water and has practiced scuba and freediving from a young age. At University, Tamara majored in Communication Science and initially developed a career in marketing management in Belgium, where her eagerness to see the world took her by chance.

After 10 years of enjoying life as a Bruxelloise, she was naturalized Belgian. She holds dual nationality and she is very proud of her adoptive country, keeping close ties with it and visiting when possible. In 2014 Tamara felt a calling to pursue a life in nature and she left her European dream life to go back to her roots and become a scuba instructor in Mexican waters.

Here, she rediscovered her love for the Ocean and became involved in conservation projects, research, marine biology programs, and underwater naturalism.

She has dived in Mexico extensively, and also visited Egypt, Maldives, the Marshall Islands, and Belize for diving. The Ocean led to the caverns, and the caverns to the caves (figuratively and literally), ultimately realizing that the Cenotes had been there all her life but they had now taken a whole new dimension. In 2017 she started technical training including cave and decompression diving. Tec diving allowed her to become a scientific diver in multiple projects and to work as a cavern guide while running her independent scuba diving business.

During the lockdown in 2020, Tamara was introduced to the art of survey and exploration and decided to start training to become a technical diving instructor under the mentorship of Patrick Widmann. In parallel, she started a cave diving project to be able to document and identify fossilized coral species in the Mexican caves, which was backed by Xdeep Exploration Support Program. This has put Tamara on the tracks of a professional career focused on cave diving.

Other facts about Tamara? She is a freediver, certified Aida 4*, and able to dive to 40m on one breath… She was a National Geographic Explorer 2018-2020 with a short environmental documentary film called Mermaids Against Plastic (link:   https://vimeo.com/372952803/bc16bafbe7 ),   winner of a Jackson Wild film award. And she speaks and teaches in Spanish, English and French.

Diver Levels:

• CMAS Scientific Diver

• IANTD Full Cave Diver

• PSAI Stage Deco Cave Diver

• PSAI DPV Diver 

• KISS Sidewinder MOD 1

• TDI Advanced Nitrox and Deco Procedures

• PADI Tek45 

Click Here for a Q & A with Tamara