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.”
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.
Flying 250 miles southwest from Mahé on a 16-seater Beechcraft jet, I see on our descent swathes of emerald green cascading through otherwise sapphire waters. They’re colonies of seagrass, an oceanic plant and a carbon sink 35 times more effective than a rainforest. Alphonse Island Lodge is the base from which I dive, snorkel, and immerse myself in the marine wilderness of the Indian Ocean.
But the resort also demonstrates what low-impact stays can look like in Seychelles. Mostly solar-powered, it runs desalination and sewage treatment plants as well as rainwater harvesting and recycling programs. On the lodge’s roughly 430,000-square-foot farm, I spot, within the beds of tomatoes, butternut squash, and brassica, a heron opening its wings like a cemetery angel. Lady finger bananas grow in pretty, mechanical spirals near hives of Seychellois bees and piles of compost that smell of parsnips and provide over half a ton of fertilizer every week. The farm produces four tons of crops a month, supplying up to 90 percent of plant-based food in all of Blue Safari’s accommodations across the Outer Islands: a guesthouse on Astove, an eco-camp on Cosmoledo atoll, and this lodge on Alphonse.
Blue Safari sources fish only from the open ocean, never the reef. In fact, the company supports the operations of the Alphonse Foundation, an NGO that facilitates Blue Safari’s conservation strategy and funds the presence of Seychelles’s Island Conservation Society on Alphonse. It surveys the atoll’s reef as well as the migratory-bird and fish populations. Last year the foundation tagged about 20 manta rays and 32 sharks—lemon, gray, reef, silvertip, and bull species among them, none a significant threat to humans. My diving instructor Andrew Irwin tells me to keep an eye out for them: “In Indonesia you’re not guaranteed to see a big shark. Here you might see one at any moment.”
