Big Little Isles

With idyllic sandy coves, fascinating wildlife and the most luxurious of island hotels, the Seychelles archipelago has it all.

There can be little doubt that Seychelles is the Indian Ocean’s most beautiful island nation. Only the most perverse could find fault with its white sandy beaches, elegantly arching coconut palms and thick forests fringed with warm, shallow lagoons the colour of sparrows’ eggs.

One thousand six hundred kilometres off the east coast of Africa and just a few degrees south of the equator, the 115 Edenic islands are always warm and sometimes hot. Any variations in temperature or precipitation are down to the currents, as well as the wind and her attendant waves; conditions can, and do, change with thrilling speed and spontaneity.

A total of 43 Inner Islands huddle around the capital on Mahé, all but two of which are granitic and festooned with colossal boulders weathered into fantastical pleats and folds. A couple of hundred kilometres south lies the Amirantes group, the closest of the Seychelles’ Outer Islands, with the stupendously remote Farquhar and Aldabra atolls further still.

Seychelles is resolutely French, thanks to its eighteenth-century colonisers, strangely Anglophile (it became a crown colony after the Napoleonic wars), but proudly Creole, with the population an intriguing mixture of all the characters to have washed ashore since the seventeenth century. This has included French exiles, African slaves, and Indian and Chinese merchants.