Travel Guide
The Seychelles: a complete guide to the 115 islands
Written by people who live here. Updated for 2026.
The inner granitic islands
Mahé, Praslin, and La Digue form the heartland of any Seychelles journey. Mahé is the largest island and the point of arrival for all international flights, but it rewards those who stay longer than a transit night. The Morne Seychellois National Park covers a third of the island and contains cloud forest trails that smell of cinnamon and native orchid. Victoria, the world's smallest capital, has a Saturday market that is the best single introduction to Seychellois Creole culture: turmeric, bilimbi, salted fish, and the lady who has been selling coconut nougat from the same table for thirty years.
Praslin is the island most guests choose as their base. It has two things that exist nowhere else on earth: the Vallée de Mai — a UNESCO World Heritage primary forest of coco-de-mer palms managed by the Seychelles Islands Foundation — and Anse Lazio, a northwest-facing beach where the reef begins in knee-deep water and the Seychelles black parrot occasionally crosses the bay at dawn. La Digue, reachable by a fifteen-minute ferry, is four kilometres of granite boulders, bicycle paths, and the kind of unhurried pace the rest of the world abandoned in the 1950s.
The private islands
North Island and Fregate Island Private represent the apex of the Seychelles private island experience — not because of their amenities, but because of their conservation programmes. North Island has planted 350,000 endemic trees since 1997 and reintroduced the Seychelles white-eye and the Seychelles magpie-robin to a landscape that had lost both. Fregate completed a total rat eradication in 2000 that restored eight endemic bird species and allowed a tortoise population of 3,500 individuals to establish itself on 55 hectares. Both islands operate at a staff ratio of four or five to one. The result is service that feels less like hospitality and more like being looked after by people who know you.
Félicité — home to Six Senses Zil Pasyon — combines granite island scenery with a wellness programme that is genuinely substantive: biohacking facilities, a coral restoration nursery, and a yoga platform set into the rock face above the channel. Denis Island is the most accessible of the private islands and the best choice for guests whose primary interest is diving and snorkelling without a boat.
The outer islands
Beyond the inner archipelago lies a different Seychelles. Alphonse Island, 280 kilometres southwest of Mahé on the edge of the Seychelles Bank, is one of the world's premier fly-fishing destinations. The eastern flat at low tide — acres of white sand and seagrass in water that clears to the bottom — holds bonefish, permit, triggerfish, and giant trevally. Desroches, at the gateway of the Amirantes chain, offers 14 kilometres of beach and the most consistent kite surfing conditions in the archipelago.
Aldabra, 1,100 kilometres from Mahé, is the reason the Seychelles is taken seriously as a conservation destination. The world's largest raised coral atoll, it is home to 100,000 giant Aldabra tortoises — more than the entire Galapagos — and one of the least disturbed marine ecosystems in the Indian Ocean. Access requires a research permit from the Seychelles Islands Foundation. We have been taking permitted expeditions to Aldabra since 2026. The crossing takes two days by vessel. It is worth every hour.
When to travel
The Seychelles has two monsoon seasons and two transition periods. The northwest monsoon (November to March) brings warm, calm conditions to the inner islands — ideal for diving, sailing, and beach travel. The southeast trade season (May to September) delivers consistent winds that make it the best period for kite surfing, sailing passages, and fly-fishing on the outer island flats. April and October are the transition months: April in particular offers the clearest diving visibility of the year — up to 30 metres at Shark Bank — and the narrow window when whale sharks pass through the channel east of Mahé following the tuna migration northward.
There is no bad month to visit the Seychelles. There are better months for specific activities. Our planning team matches your journey to the calendar before we design anything else.
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