Vallée de Mai

In a valley in the middle of Praslin, the second-largest island of the Seychelles, a forest of giant palms grows much as it did before people reached the islands. The Vallée de Mai covers only 19.5 hectares, which makes it one of the smallest natural World Heritage Sites, but UNESCO listed it in 1983 on all four natural criteria. It is the stronghold of the coco de mer, the palm whose double nut is the largest seed produced by any plant, and it is the only place where all six palm species endemic to the Seychelles grow together.

Walking in, the first thing you notice is the light. Coco de mer palms rise to 25 or 30 metres and hold fan-shaped leaves up to 7 to 10 metres long, so the canopy filters the sun into a green and bronze gloom. The trees are either male or female; the males carry long catkins, and the females bear the heavy nuts; the largest on record weighed 42 kilograms. Around them grow the other endemics: the thief palm, the Seychelles stilt palm, millionaire's salad palm and two latanier palms, alongside pandanus screw pines and broadleaf trees. Praslin is granite, a fragment of old continental crust left behind when Gondwana broke apart, and the forest is a relic of that ancient isolation.

The valley is also the best place to find the Seychelles black parrot, a rare bird found only on Praslin, which feeds on native palm fruit and nests in dead palm trunks. Blue pigeons, bulbuls and sunbirds move through the canopy, while bronze geckos, day geckos, tree frogs and tiger chameleons cling to the trunks and leaves. The strange shape of the coco de mer nut inspired a 19th-century legend: the British general Charles Gordon visited in 1881 and became convinced that this valley was the Garden of Eden and the coco de mer the tree of knowledge.

The reserve is managed by the Seychelles Islands Foundation, which keeps several marked trails of between about 1.5 and 4 km, a visitor centre and a café.

Getting there

The reserve lies in the centre of Praslin, about ten minutes by car from Praslin Island Airport (PRI), which is around 5 km away, and from the ferry jetty at Baie Sainte Anne. From Mahé, a fast ferry runs from Victoria, about 45 km away, which takes around an hour; from the jetty, continue by taxi or bus.