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In an abandoned copra plantation on Astove, a tiny atoll in Seychelles, I find giant tortoises. Beneath the palm trees they look like the helmets of a hiding army platoon. The land, the domain too of hermit crabs and fallen coconuts, is littered with shells. It encircles eight square miles of lagoon, forming a thin border between sky and ocean. Migratory birds make it their landing strip; green turtles use it as a nesting ground, plowing tracks through sand as powdery as snow. Though Astove’s sand flats are as smooth as mother-of-pearl, its reefs are treacherous. Sharp blades of fossilized coral, or champignon, can shred feet and destroy vessels. A ghost yacht, the Shangri-La, lies beached on the atoll’s northwestern shore; no one knows its past. Astove is also surrounded by the tempestuous waters of the western Indian Ocean—the former Sea of Zanj, feared by medieval Arab explorers—that, whipped up by the trade winds, roll and roar in the summer. Windswept isolation, inhospitality to humans, and piracy have historically kept this place one of the planet’s truly wild and naturally protected places. That’s the reason I’m here.
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Beneath the water’s mercury surface, I snorkel through Astove’s oyster-shaped reef and find tiny fish twitching electrically like particles in a grainy film as well as giant specimens gliding en masse through bars of light. Battalions of bluestripe snapper and humphead wrasse—just two of the thousand species that swim here—jump in unison with the current before a vertical coral garden. The reef wall has a drop of 3,000 feet; with half a mile of blackness beneath me, I might appear to be floating in space. When I come up for air, the lava lamp glow of sunset makes me feel that I am indeed drifting on some fringe of the earth.
Scattered across the lapis lazuli expanse of the Indian Ocean, Seychelles is a collection of 115 islands and atolls off the coast of East Africa, one of the world’s most remote and least populated nations. Of about 120,000 Seychellois, 98 percent inhabit the 43 Inner Islands, which constitute about 175 square miles of land surrounded by roughly 529,000 of ocean territory. The remaining 2 percent live on the other 72 coral atolls and sand cays, divided into five geographical groups, that make up the Outer Islands (Zil Elwannyen Sesel, in the archipelago’s local creole), of which Astove is one of the farthest south. At 647 miles and two plane rides away from Mahé, the largest of the Inner Islands and of Seychelles as a whole, Astove is closer to Madagascar than to its own capital of Victoria.
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Tourism took off in Seychelles in the early 1970s, when Mahé’s airport first opened, giving rise today to the highest GDP per capita in Africa. On Mahé, among forested mountains, jellyfish trees, and rare orchids, travelers usually stay at big-name hotels like the Four Seasons, Anantara, and Kempinski; the newest among them, the Cheval Blanc Seychelles, opened in 2024. While luxury resorts have historically kept to the Inner Islands, they’re reaching the Outer Islands too: The Four Seasons opened its second Seychelles property in 2018, on Desroches Island; Waldorf Astoria Seychelles Platte Island cut its ribbon last year.
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To keep tourism in check on the Outer Islands, Seychelles currently employs a “one island, one resort” policy (though the country is considering two hotels on the island of Coëtivy). Environmental and wildlife conservation has become integral to Seychellois culture. In 1994 the Seychelles government banned turtle hunting; just over 30 years later, Aldabra is now home to one of the largest green turtle breeding populations in the western Indian Ocean. “Eating turtle curry was once part of our culture,” says Gilly Mein, a taxi driver who takes me to the airport in Mahé. “Nowadays it would be sacrilege.”
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In 2018 Seychelles became the world’s first country to launch a Blue Bond, raising $15 million from global investors to write off part of its national debt in exchange for a commitment to protect 30 percent of its waters—162,000 square miles of it. The Outer Islands fall within this protection zone and now bloom with rare-species comeback stories. The Aldabra Group, which includes Astove, hosts some of the planet’s largest seabird colonies. The Aldabra atoll itself is now a UNESCO site and home to more than 150,000 giant tortoises.
“The Seychelles are the Indian Ocean’s Galápagos,” says my guide Elle Brighton, the ecology and sustainability manager of Blue Safari, a low-impact ocean-adventure company. It was founded in 2012 by the South African–born Seychellois citizen Murray Collins, who owns camps on mainland Africa, and the fly fisherman and Yeti brand ambassador Keith Rose-Innes. In 2012, Blue Safari took over Alphonse Island Lodge, the lone accommodation on the tiny ray-shaped island of less than a square mile, and turned it into a 29-key eco-resort.
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