At first, I thought I’d imagined it.
Not a full shape. Just something slightly off in the water. Then it moved.
We were standing just off Aquarium Beach at Four Seasons Resort Seychelles Desroches Island, fins half on, the sea flat before the light started to drop. Nasreen Khan, the resort’s conservationist and marine biologist, had brought us here to see one of the island’s most important marine habitats: a vast seagrass meadow that feeds its population of green sea turtles.
The water was so clear it played tricks with perspective: distances shortened and shapes sharpened. A turtle surfaced a few metres ahead, took a breath and slipped beneath the water again. Then another appeared, followed by another, until we realised they had been there all along. We had simply begun to notice them, moving through the seagrass as they had long before we entered the water.
Nasreen had been clear about how to behave around them. They need an unobstructed path to the surface, so we kept our distance. Don’t approach. Don’t follow. If they look at you, look away. In observing those rules, something shifted. Not in them, but in us.
Four Seasons Resort Seychelles at Desroches Island sits between dense tropical vegetation and a sweep of white sand, while the island’s historic lighthouse looks out over the Indian Ocean.
Desroches sits low in the Seychelles’ Amirante group, a coral island reached by a 35-minute charter flight from Mahé. There is a single resort here, spread quietly across it, with no competing noise or through-traffic, and a stillness that takes most people at least a day to stop resisting.
Places like this are often described as untouched. They aren’t. What you see is managed, monitored and, in parts, rebuilt over time. The resort isn’t simply placed here; it helps allow this version of the island to exist.
Bicycles wait outside every villa, initials already marked onto them. It is how you move around: past solar arrays set back from view, past a stretch of beach you hadn’t planned to find. You are invited to wander, to see what you find.
Two distinctive residents of Desroches Island: left, the Aldabra giant tortoise, a gentle and surprisingly sensitive creature that may even enjoy a careful neck rub when approached responsibly; right, a male Madagascar fody, bringing a flash of red to the tropical foliage.
When I sat down with Nasreen, I asked the obvious question: why marine biology, why conservation, why here?
“I used to watch this cartoon, Captain Planet,” she said. “There was this self-proclaimed marine biologist in it, and I used to pretend to be her.” I told her I had wanted to be Eliza Thornberry from The Wild Thornberrys, convinced I’d grow up speaking to animals. Unfortunately, I’m still waiting for them to talk back.
There is a directness to how Nasreen works, grounded in measurable data and long-term change, but also an openness in how she brings people into that process.
Earlier, she had pointed to a faint line beneath the surface: 800 reef boulders, placed after storms stripped sections of the island back at speed. Built first to hold the shoreline in place, they are now doing something more ecologically complex. “Coral is now attaching itself to those structures,” Nasreen said. Fish have followed. She measures growth, records species and tracks what returns. Some of the earliest reef balls, placed in 2022, already support significant coral growth. “It’s still early,” she said. “People think reefs recover quickly. They don’t.”
Desroches is also home to one of the largest seagrass meadows in the Seychelles, an ecosystem that supports marine life and stores carbon. It sustains the island’s unusually high population of green sea turtles, particularly juveniles, which use Aquarium Beach as a feeding ground.
The work is supported by the Island Conservation Society, which guides conservation decisions and coordinates monitoring across several Seychelles islands. Independent scientific oversight, combined with the resort’s infrastructure and funding, makes it possible. “Back home we say Ubuntu,” Nasreen told me. “It means unity. You can’t think about conservation without thinking about people. It has to be both.”
She is developing an Ocean Academy, giving younger guests a structured way to engage with the work: identifying species, understanding ecosystems and taking part in what is being tracked. “People protect what they care about,” she said, “and they only care once they understand it.”
A coral outcrop alive with shoals of anthias, two spotted eagle rays gliding above the seagrass, and a green turtle swimming in the shallows reveal the richness of the reef and seagrass meadows surrounding Four Seasons Resort Seychelles at Desroches Island.
“Nasreen is right”, I think, swimming the reef the following day. Diving off the island, there is a moment after you enter, tank on your back, equalising as you descend, when everything else drops away. The noise goes first. Then the reef comes into focus. Not in the over-saturated, picture-perfect way we see in films, but in a way that is holding and, in places, recovering. Rays move steadily across the seabed. Reef sharks pass without hesitation. You understand Nasreen’s point properly down here. You can’t care about what you can’t see, and now I had seen it.
It is easy to describe Desroches in simple terms. Remote. Quiet. Exclusive. All true. But that is not what holds. For me, it is how the island works: the seagrass supports the turtles, the reef is given time to return, and you are brought into that, not fully or all at once, but enough to understand that none of it is accidental.
The turtles hadn’t changed anything that first afternoon. I had.
Author: Emma Blunt
Lead image: A juvenile green sea turtle feeding in the seagrass meadow off Desroches Island.
All images © Four Seasons Resort Seychelles except for the photograph of the green turtle in the body text, © Emma Blunt; and Nasreen Khan’s photograph and Madagascar fody’s @ Lochie Fuller Photography.
More about the Seychelles Islands in our feature, An Adventure Holiday in the Seychelles, and Alphonse Island – The Seychelles.
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