We revisit the continuous formulation introduced in Discacciati and Oyarzúa (2017) for the stationary Navier–Stokes/Darcy (NSD) coupled system and propose an equivalent scheme that does not require a Lagrange multiplier to enforce the continuity of normal velocities at the interface. Building on this formulation and following a similar approach to Kanschat and Rivière (2010), we derive a mass-conservative, H(div)–conforming finite element method for the NSD system.