Seychelles
Discover Seychelles
Introduction
The Seychelles is an archipelago of a hundred and fifteen islands scattered over more than a million square kilometres of the western Indian Ocean, about 1,600 kilometres east of the African mainland. It divides into two quite different groups.
The inner islands — Mahé, Praslin, La Digue and their neighbours — are granite, which makes them almost unique: they are fragments of the ancient supercontinent Gondwana rather than volcanic cones or coral atolls, and the enormous weathered boulders piled along their beaches are the reason those beaches are so recognisable. Mahé holds the airport, the mountains and Victoria, among the smallest capital cities in the world. Praslin has the Vallée de Mai, a palm forest that is a UNESCO site and the only place the coco de mer — the largest seed of any plant on earth — grows wild. La Digue is small, largely bicycle-powered, and holds Anse Source d’Argent.
The outer islands are coralline, low and remote, and include Aldabra, a raised atoll a thousand kilometres from anywhere with around a hundred thousand giant tortoises — more than anywhere else in the world — and a second UNESCO listing. Roughly half the country’s land is protected, and the Creole culture, language and cooking draw on African, French, Indian and Chinese lines at once.
