Seychelles

Seychelles scatters across the western Indian Ocean north-east of Madagascar, and its inner islands are granite rather than coral or lava, a sliver of the southern supercontinent stranded as India drifted north. On La Digue, beaches are framed by sculpted grey boulders. In the Vallée de Mai on Praslin grows the coco de mer, a palm whose double nut is the largest seed in the plant kingdom. Aldabra, a raised coral atoll far to the south-west, shelters giant tortoises.

Arab and Portuguese sailors knew the islands, but nobody lived there when France claimed them in 1756, naming them after Louis XV’s finance minister, Jean Moreau de Séchelles. Settlers arrived from Île de France in 1770 with enslaved Africans to plant spices and cotton. Britain took the islands in the Napoleonic Wars and governed them from Mauritius until 1903. Africans freed from slave ships by the Royal Navy, and Indian and Chinese traders, followed. Independence came in June 1976.

Moutya, a drum dance first sung by enslaved people around night fires, and the quicker sega fill the Festival Kreol each October. Meals turn on fish: grilled red snapper, octopus curry in coconut milk, and ladob, plantain or breadfruit stewed in sweet coconut milk. Cinnamon and vanilla grow in the hills, relics of the plantation years. Tourism earns the most from abroad, from small guesthouses to private-island resorts, and purse-seiners land tuna at Mahé’s harbour, where a large cannery packs the catch for export.