Aldabra Atoll Seychelles
1
Cruises availables
At departure or passage at this port
Frequently Asked Questions
By zodiac, when tide and swell allow. There is no tourist infrastructure and no pier: landings follow marked trails, accompanied by reserve rangers and the ship's naturalists.
No. The atoll falls under the Seychelles Islands Foundation, which issues access permits sparingly to a handful of duly authorized expedition ships. Groups are kept deliberately small.
It is the largest raised coral atoll in the world, so isolated that no road, airport or village has ever reached it. That isolation has made it one of the last places on the planet where nature decides alone.
More than a hundred thousand, the largest population of giant tortoises in the world, more than the Galapagos. They are everywhere: filing along the trails, dozing in the scarce shade of the shrubs, motionless at the edge of pools.
Stay on the trails, keep your distance, take nothing, leave nothing. The rangers repeat them at every landing. The atoll receives fewer visitors in a year than many sites see in an hour, and that rarity is the condition of what you come to see.
In the lagoon mangroves nest colonies of frigatebirds with scarlet pouches and red-footed boobies. On the fossil coral scurries the white-throated rail, the last flightless bird in the entire Indian Ocean.
Yes, a small station on Picard Island, run by the Seychelles Islands Foundation. Its rangers accompany visitors, and the atoll owes its daily protection to them.
Yes. In the 1960s a military base project briefly threatened these shores, before the international scientific community secured its abandonment. Research gained a natural laboratory; travellers, an intact world.
Rarely. Zodiac landings, equatorial heat, sharp coral trails and strict discipline: this is not a beach call. Nature-obsessed teenagers get plenty out of it, young children much less.
Closed shoes with sturdy soles for the fossil coral, a hat, mineral sunscreen, plenty of water and binoculars. There is nothing to buy on site: everything leaves the ship with you.
