The park covers roughly 14 square kilometres of shallow lagoon five kilometres off Victoria, enclosing six granite islands: Sainte Anne, Moyenne, Cerf, Long, Round and Île Cachée. Their bedrock is Precambrian granite, close to 750 million years old, a geology shared with no other mid-ocean island group on earth. Sainte Anne itself received the archipelago's first permanent settlers in 1770, twenty-eight people landed under Corneille Nicolas Morphey's claim. Cerf Island takes its name from the frigate Cerf, which carried that expedition. A whaling station operated on Sainte Anne through the nineteenth century; its foundations remain in the undergrowth. Today a sainte anne marine park tour crosses water that once carried whale oil to Mahé.
Moyenne holds the stranger history. Brendon Grimshaw, a Yorkshire newspaper editor, bought the nine-hectare island in 1962 for £8,000 and spent forty-seven years planting 16,000 trees and clearing footpaths by hand. He introduced giant Aldabra tortoises, whose descendants still graze the interior. Two unmarked graves and a persistent pirate-treasure legend sit near the summit path. Grimshaw died in 2012; Moyenne became a national park in its own right in 2009, absorbed into the wider protected area. Most sainte anne marine national park tours and the more focused st anne marine park snorkeling tour itineraries put ashore here.
The lagoon matters ecologically as much as historically. Seagrass meadows of Thalassodendron and Syringodium carpet the shallows between islands, feeding a resident population of hawksbill and green turtles that nest on Cerf's northern beaches. Coral cover suffered severely in the 1998 and 2016 bleaching events; nursery programmes run by the Seychelles Parks and Gardens Authority have since transplanted staghorn and table coral onto degraded reef flats. Parrotfish, batfish, sergeant majors and the occasional eagle ray move through water rarely deeper than eight metres. That clarity is why a st. anne marine park boat tour so often runs with a glass-bottom hull rather than a closed deck.
Protection is funded directly by visitors. The 200 SCR conservation fee — per person, for non-residents 12 years and over — underwrites ranger patrols, mooring buoys and reef monitoring. A sainte anne marine park tour ticket is, in that narrow sense, a subscription to the reef's continued existence.
6 hr 30 min
