SALAZIE NATURE TRAIL

A cool, misty highland walk in the Morne Seychellois National Park, where granite domes are dotted with wild pitcher plants and the air smells of wet forest instead of salt.

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Above the heat of the coast

Most of Seychelles that visitors see sits at sea level. The Salazie trail takes you the other way, up into the Morne Seychellois National Park that fills the mountainous spine of Mahe. Within twenty minutes of leaving the coast road the temperature drops, the light goes soft and green, and the traffic of Victoria is replaced by birdsong and the drip of mist through the canopy. This is the island that existed long before the first plantation.

The trailhead sits high on the Sans Souci road that crosses the mountains between Victoria and Port Glaud. The path is a mix of forest track and bare granite, and while it is not a hard climb it is a real one, so proper shoes and water matter more here than a beach day ever asks of you.

Pitcher plants on the glacis

The reason serious walkers come to Salazie is the flora. As the forest opens onto glacis, the smooth granite slabs that give the Seychelles highlands their bald grey crowns, you start to find the pitcher plant, Nepenthes pervillei. It grows nowhere in the world except on these high granite islands, trapping insects in its curved vessels because the thin mountain soil gives it so little else to feed on. Seeing it in the wild, clinging to bare rock in the cloud, is one of the quiet highlights of botanical Seychelles.

Endemic ferns, screwpines and mosses crowd the shaded sections, and the birdlife includes highland species you will not meet on the beach. A local guide is worth arranging if you want to read the forest rather than just pass through it.

Traces of an older island

Salazie also carries the marks of human effort. Old stone terraces and clearings on the slopes recall early attempts to farm cinnamon and other crops high above the coast, before the plantations settled lower down. The forest has largely taken them back, which is part of the atmosphere. You walk through a landscape that was worked, abandoned and then reclaimed by the wild.

Nearby  Morne Blanc trail area · Seychelles National Botanical Gardens · Victoria Clock Tower

Start early and check the sky. The glacis is glorious in clear light and genuinely slippery in the rain, so a dry morning is worth waiting for.