One hundred and fifteen granite and coral islands of extraordinary natural beauty scattered across the western Indian Ocean in a constellation of pristine magnificence that has no true equal anywhere on earth — where the ancient Coco de Mer palm forest of Praslin’s UNESCO-listed Vallée de Mai shelters the world’s largest seed in an environment so primeval and so extraordinarily beautiful that early explorers genuinely believed they had rediscovered the original Garden of Eden, the perfectly composed pink granite boulder beaches of La Digue’s Anse Source d’Argent create the world’s most photographed and most consistently celebrated beach landscape, and the extraordinary marine biodiversity of the Aldabra Atoll’s UNESCO World Heritage reef ecosystem shelters giant tortoises, manta rays, and hawksbill turtles in a state of breathtaking natural preservation.