Dolphin Encountours Research Center

Our vision is to promote sustainable marine mammal tourism and this is achieved through conserving our natural resources, first and foremost the dolphins who are resident in the area. The most valuable way we can contribute to the dolphins is in data collection and dissemination.

The project was created in 1998 with the purpose of initiating and collecting data on marine mammals populations encountered on tours and is the vision of co-founder & citizen scientist Angie Gullan, creator of Africa’s first structured wild dolphin swim program Dolphin Encountours. In 1999 Angie established the Dolphin Center in Ponta do Ouro. The Local dolphins of Ponta have been part of a longterm monitoring project that can now confirm a core residency of only 50-60 bottlenose dolphins and only 6 humpback dolphins.

We are in essence an eco-tourism, research and conservation organisation whose objective it is to provide intimate and close encounters with wild and free dolphins while putting back . The past two decades have been spent nurturing a friendship and creating a safe space for human dolphin encounters to take place that works within the realms of 'conscious interaction'. A behaviour were dolphin/s stop what they are doing to come and engage, simply because they want to!  We work with a gregarious, sentient population of non-humans persons affectionately called the dolphins of ponta who find home in the coastal shallows of the Ponta do Ouro Partial Marine Reserve which borders iSilmangaliso World Heritage Site within the Lubumbo Transfrontier Conservation Area of South Africa.