Seychelles declared Sainte Anne a marine national park in 1973, making it the first protected marine area in the Indian Ocean. The designation covered roughly 15 square kilometres of lagoon and reef off Victoria, enclosing six granite islands: Sainte Anne, Cerf, Moyenne, Round, Long, and Cachée. The archipelago's recorded history begins earlier. French settlers landed on Sainte Anne Island in 1770, the first permanent settlement anywhere in the Seychelles. Whalers worked the channel through the nineteenth century. Long Island later held a prison; Round Island a leper colony. Moyenne passed in 1962 to Brendon Grimshaw, a Yorkshire newspaper editor who bought the neglected 22-hectare island for £8,000, planted some 16,000 trees, and introduced roughly 120 Aldabra giant tortoises. He refused offers reported in the millions and left the island to the nation. Moyenne became a national park in its own right in 2009 — at the time, the smallest national park on earth. Travellers searching for sainte anne marine national park tickets are, in effect, buying passage into that bequest. What the water protects matters more than the land. The shallow shelf between the islands holds seagrass meadows that sustain hawksbill and green turtles, both of which nest on these beaches. Fringing coral reef, badly bleached during the 1998 El Niño event, has recovered in patches around Cerf and Round. Over 150 fish species have been recorded here, among them parrotfish, damselfish, batfish, and the reef-cleaning wrasse. The Seychelles Parks and Gardens Authority administers the park and collects a conservation fee of 200 SCR per adult non-resident, per day, which funds ranger patrols, mooring buoys installed to spare the coral from anchors, and reef monitoring. The granite itself is the geological curiosity. These islands are fragments of Gondwana — continental rock, some of it 750 million years old, stranded mid-ocean when India drifted north. Almost every other tropical island group of this kind is volcanic or coralline. Here, boulders the colour of weathered pewter meet white sand directly, a contrast that has defined the visual identity of the Seychelles landmarks for two centuries of engraving, photograph, and postcard. Victoria sits four kilometres west across the channel, its harbour visible from Moyenne's summit trail. The proximity is the paradox of the place: a capital city and a first-generation marine reserve within sight of one another. Demand for sainte anne marine national park tickets tickets reflects that rare adjacency.