Holidays in Seychelles

Official national public holidays. Regional and religious observances may vary by area.

About Time in Seychelles

A Seed That Refuses to Hurry

The coco de mer, a palm found growing wild nowhere on Earth except two granite islands of the Seychelles, Praslin and Curieuse, produces the largest and heaviest seed known to science, a single nut that can weigh as much as forty pounds. Almost everything about the plant's life cycle is stretched out to a scale that makes ordinary garden timelines look rushed. A fertilised fruit takes six to ten years just to ripen on the tree, and once it finally falls, the seed inside can take up to two more years to germinate. The seedling that eventually emerges is in no hurry either: a coco de mer palm typically needs twenty-five to fifty years of growth before it flowers for the first time.

Long before anyone traced the tree to its actual home, the nuts were already travelling the Indian Ocean on their own schedule, drifting ashore in the Maldives, along the coast of India and across East Africa, where they were prized as curiosities and believed by some to grow on invisible submarine trees, since no one had yet found the source. Left undisturbed by fire, disease or human harvesting, individual coco de mer palms are thought capable of continuing to flower and fruit for as long as eight hundred years, a lifespan so far beyond ordinary human planning horizons that conservationists managing the surviving wild population, concentrated in the UNESCO-listed Vallée de Mai on Praslin, describe losing even a single mature tree as a loss no replanting effort can meaningfully undo within several human lifetimes.

A Species That Outlives Empires

The giant tortoises native to the Seychelles and its outlying Aldabra Atoll are among the longest-lived land animals known, with an average life expectancy for the species estimated at around a century and a half, a figure some individuals have gone on to substantially outlast. The largest remaining wild population survives today on Aldabra Atoll itself, a UNESCO World Heritage Site whose isolation has allowed tens of thousands of the tortoises to persist relatively undisturbed since long before the islands were permanently settled by people at all.

The most famous individual of the species, a tortoise named Jonathan, was born in the Seychelles around 1832, decades before the archipelago had any regular administration of its own, and was later given as a gift to the governor of the remote South Atlantic island of Saint Helena in 1882, when he was already an estimated fifty years old. He has lived there ever since, and by 2026 his age was estimated at somewhere around 193 to 194 years, making him, by most authoritative accounts, the oldest confirmed tortoise and the oldest known living land animal on Earth, a single creature whose lifespan has stretched across the entire span of Seychelles' modern political history, from British crown colony to independent republic, despite having left the islands of his birth almost a century and a half ago.

The Clock That Strikes Every Hour Twice

At the heart of Victoria, the Seychelles' small capital, stands a cast-iron clock tower known locally as Lorloz, a Creole rendering of the French l'horloge, inaugurated on 1 April 1903 by the colony's governor, Ernest Bickham Sweet-Escott. It was built as a memorial to Queen Victoria following her death two years earlier, cast by the English foundry Gillett and Johnston and funded partly by public subscription, with the government covering the remainder of its roughly $735 cost, and it doubled, by design and by coincidence, as a marker of the moment Seychelles was formally elevated from a dependency of Mauritius into its own separate British Crown Colony.

The tower is a scaled-down copy of a similarly named clock, Little Ben, that still stands near Victoria Station in London, though few visitors to either city realise the connection runs both ways. Seychelles' own Lorloz has one distinctive quirk unrelated to its London namesake: it strikes each hour not once but twice, a peculiarity local enough to have worked its way into a well-known Creole folk song about the islands. More than a century after its installation, the clock tower remains largely unchanged in appearance, having only recently undergone its first major structural and mechanical restoration, carried out, fittingly, by the direct successor firm to the same Croydon clockmakers who originally built it.

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