Fall in love with Seychelles’ natural beauty

So, there’s no lock on the bathroom then?” “No lock? There’s no wall,” laughed the hotel rep as he showed me to my beachfront spa cottage, explaining the ‘barefoot luxury’ experience of Denis Island Resort, a tiny – just 1.3km by 1.75km – coralline crescent situated a 30-minute flight away from the Seychellois main island of Mahé.

A former coconut plantation, this privately owned slice of paradise has now been developed for ecotourism, and guests are expected to embrace the wireless and lockless serenity of a place where there are no keys in your room, no internet, no TV, no phone signal and the cuisine consists almost exclusively of produce reared on the island’s own organic farm.

A mere cluster of dots off the coast of East Africa on any world map, this picturesque Indian Ocean archipelago consists of a mixture of coralline islands (like Denis) and granitic islands – fertile fragments of the ancient supercontinent of Godwana that have been separated from other continents for 75 million years. Although it was discovered by Europeans at the start of the 16th century, it remained uninhabited by humans – save the odd pirate-ship crew – until the mid-1700s, when it was settled by the French, then ceded to the British in 1814, until achieving independence in 1976. This late human occupation means that a significant bulk of its vast, verdant and unique biodiversity remains intact to this day.

Certainly, a walk around Denis Island is like a crash course in natural history. As well as the tortoises, there are the flying foxes chittering in the trees, the flocks of brightly coloured birds squawking and flitting through the casuarina pines, coconut crabs scuttling across the sand, and eagle rays and turtles suspended in the watery shallows. And that’s just the wild animals – hike across to the estate area of the island and you’re greeted by ducks, guinea fowl, chickens, rabbits and cattle being reared on the island’s own farm, which is part of Denis’s aim to be wholly self-sustainable. And this is all aside from the many hundreds of types of plants – from Indian almond trees to a dozen variety of pines, shrubs and vibrant flowers. If it’s possible to have an embarrassment of fecundity, Denis Island is blushing.

Lying down on my spa cottage’s outdoor massage bed as my therapist rubbed oil into my travel-worn limbs, it was hard to imagine that until quite recently Denis – like most of the Seychelles islands – was almost entirely coconut plantation and bustling copra factory. But when the archipelago’s first international airport opened in 1971, tourism took over from the plantation industry as the most profitable source of income almost overnight, and in 1975 the island was turned into a holiday destination – and both Denis and the rest of the archipelago have been getting more and more luxurious and sophisticated ever since.

This is where David and Victoria Beckham celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary, and where Prince William and Kate Middleton escaped to after the royal wedding.

Of course all of the biggest names in luxury hotel brands have arrived for a piece of the action too. After two days of private-island seclusion, we left Denis to stay at the Banyan Tree Seychelles, a vast colonial-style mansion set dramatically into the lush rocky hills on the coast of Mahé.

With only one night at the Banyan Tree, we had just enough time to appreciate the sweeping beach views and enjoy a deep sleep in the luxurious beds before packing up for the archipelago’s second-largest island, Praslin, a short twin-engine plane trip or 45-minute catamaran trip from Mahé.

The densest concentration of Coco de Mer plants are in Unesco world heritage site the Vallée De Mai, a prehistoric forest and relic of the ancient Gondwana continent in the centre of Praslin, which also hosts unique wildlife such as the Seychelles black parrot as well as other animals.

We explored the Vallée De Mai from our base at the Raffles Praslin – another high-end hotel brand that’s recently arrived for a slice of the Seychellois charm.

Despite its high-end reputation and celebrity fans, there are now several places on La Digue, as well as elsewhere around the Seychelles, where it’s possible to find more affordable accommodation. The more value-friendly options all tend to be Seychellois-owned – so whatever you spend goes directly to help the economic situation of the country – and you get to enjoy the down-to-earth Creole culture from a grassroots level. Mainly of East African and Malagasy origin from the plantation slaves of the 1700s, there are around 80,000 Creoles in the Seychelles (that’s over 70 per cent of the population), and they are fiercely proud of their heritage – which can be detected in the friendly, laid-back atmosphere, the deliciously spiced traditional food, and the fact that Creole is one of the country’s official languages along with French and English.