Vallée de Mai – Unesco World Heritage Site

A UNESCO World Heritage palm forest on Praslin, home to the coco de mer and the rare black parrot. Walking its cathedral of ancient palms is one of the great natural experiences in the Seychelles.

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Lush, 19.5-hectare preserve with an ancient forest of Coco de Mer palm trees & many endemic animals.

A forest out of deep time

The Vallee de Mai is a survivor of a world that has almost vanished. It is one of only two places on earth where the coco de mer palm grows wild, a primeval forest so untouched that a nineteenth-century British general believed it was the original Garden of Eden. UNESCO made it a World Heritage Site in 1983, and walking in under the towering palms you understand why. The light turns green, the air goes still, and the canopy closes overhead like a roof.

The reserve fills a valley in the middle of Praslin and is threaded with well-kept trails that range from an easy loop to longer walks. You move at forest pace, and the reward is not a single view but the slow accumulation of detail, the scale of the trunks, the sound of the palms and the sense of standing inside something genuinely ancient.

The coco de mer and the black parrot

The star of the forest is the coco de mer, the palm that produces the largest and heaviest seed in the entire plant kingdom, a giant double nut that has fascinated and scandalised visitors for centuries because of its unmistakable shape. The male and female trees are separate, and local legend has always wrapped the palms in romance. Guides point out both, along with the strange flowering catkins of the male.

The forest is also the stronghold of the Seychelles black parrot, the national bird, which is rare and shy and lives almost nowhere else. You are more likely to hear its whistling call than to see it, but patient visitors with binoculars are sometimes rewarded. Endemic geckos, snails and other creatures fill in the rest of a small, precious world.

Doing it justice

There is an entry fee, and it goes toward protecting the reserve. Give yourself at least an hour and a half, take the guided option or the information at the entrance to read the forest properly, and go earlier in the day when it is cooler and quieter. Stick to the marked paths, both for your safety and for the fragile forest floor.

Nearby  Anse Lazio · Fond Ferdinand · Anse Georgette

Pair the forest with a beach. A morning under the palms of the Vallée de Mai and an afternoon on Anse Lazio just up the road is the perfect Praslin day, cool and green then blue and bright.