Seychelles

Why Seychelles works

Seychelles, officially the Republic of Seychelles, is an archipelagic country of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean, with its capital and largest city, Victoria, sitting about 1,500 kilometres east of mainland Africa; nearby island nations and territories include the Maldives, Comoros, Madagascar, Mauritius, and the French overseas departments of Mayotte and Réunion, along with the Chagos Archipelago to the east. Seychelles is the smallest country in Africa and the least populated sovereign African country, with an estimated population of 100,600 in 2022. The archipelago was uninhabited before sustained outside contact, first recorded by Europeans in the sixteenth century, and was not settled until the eighteenth century, when France formally claimed the islands and brought enslaved Africans there for plantation labour.

Seychelles sits atop the Seychelles microcontinent, a large submerged granite block that once lay sandwiched between Madagascar and India before the breakup of Gondwanaland; the naturalist Alfred Wegener pointed to the islands' continent-like granitic composition as evidence for continental drift. After Madagascar separated from India, interaction with the Réunion hotspot caused the diverging oceanic rift to jump repeatedly, breaking off the fragment now on the Somali plate that includes Seychelles, Mauritius, and Réunion. A group of 44 islands, 42 granitic and 2 coralline, occupies the shallow waters of the Seychelles Bank, and the country's largest island, Mahé, lies 1,550 kilometres from Mogadishu.

Seychelles allocates 42 percent of its territory to conservation, among the highest shares of any country, and its wildlife history reflects both loss and recovery: early human settlement wiped out most giant tortoises from the granitic islands and drove species such as the chestnut-flanked white eye, the Seychelles parakeet, and the saltwater crocodile to extinction, though losses were far fewer than on islands like Mauritius or Hawaii, thanks to a shorter period of human occupation. From around 1500 until the mid-1800s, pirates and sailors hunted the Aldabra giant tortoise for food, pushing its numbers to near-extinction, but a healthy, if still fragile, population of 150,000 now lives on the atoll of Aldabra, a UNESCO World Heritage Site; the rare Seychelles black parrot, the country's national bird, is similarly protected today, and the freshwater crab genus Seychellum is found nowhere else on Earth.

The climate is very humid and classified as tropical rainforest, with little variation in temperature through the year: Mahé ranges from 24 to 30°C, and rainfall runs from 2,900 millimetres annually at Victoria to 3,600 millimetres on the mountain slopes. The southeast trade winds blow steadily from May to November, the most comfortable stretch of the year, while December to April brings higher heat and humidity, though temperatures on the hottest months, March and April, seldom exceed 31°C; most of the islands lie outside the cyclone belt, so high winds remain rare.

Tourism became a major industry after Seychelles International Airport opened in 1971, gradually eclipsing the islands' older plantation economy as hotel construction spread through the 1970s, including the opening of the Coral Strand, Vista Do Mar, and Bougainville hotels in 1972. More recently, the government has encouraged foreign direct investment to upgrade its hospitality infrastructure through the Seychelles Investment Board, drawing capital into luxury real estate and integrated resort developments, while also working to reduce the economy's dependence on tourism by promoting farming, fishing, small-scale manufacturing, and an offshore financial sector.

• Seychelles — Wikipedia, CC BY-SA 4.0

Text adapted from the linked articles under CC BY-SA 4.0; edited for length.

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