Seychelles' : One of the world's smallest capital cities

 

Built on land reclaimed from the sea, Seychelles' tiny capital city can't get any bigger – but with a vibrant culture and fascinating history, it doesn't need to.

In the blink of an eye, I was flying over an unending ocean en way to the Seychelles. The next moment, the plane's window was filled with dark granite cliffs spinning in and out of the clouds, evoking all the gloomy mystery of ships lost at sea. Because there appeared to be such little space between the two, I became certain that the plane was about to crash into the lake or into a mountain.

 

The Seychelles is a 115-island archipelago, a majestic confluence of sea and land set against a sky of incomparable blues. Everything appears to happen on a vast scale here, from the towering volcanic spine on Mahé's biggest island to the 1,800 kilometers of water that separate Mahé from mainland Africa.

 

Except for Victoria, the Seychelles' small capital.

 

San Marino or Vatican City, for example, or a handful of tiny Pacific Island communities, are examples of smaller capitals around the world. Nonetheless, by the standards of other national capitals, Victoria's population of roughly 30,000 is small.

 

If there appears to be little area for an international airport along Mahé's tiny coastal strip, there appears to be even less room for a capital city. Mahé is under 20 square kilometers in size, and walking around the perimeter of the city's narrow grid of streets would take less than ten minutes. Until the ground becomes too steep, houses climb the surrounding hills.

 

Victoria's ability to grow to this magnitude is due in large part to historical geographical engineering.

 

"Half of Victoria is reclaimed ground," observed George Camille, a well-known Seychelles artist who was born and spent much of his life in Victoria. "The sea used to be where the taxi stop is now."

 

For such a small city, Victoria does a good job of telling the story of modern Seychelles through its buildings and its tightly concentrated clamour. It is an antidote to the popular Seychelles image of beaches and palm trees and a life far from the world and its noise.

 

Victoria has surprisingly deep roots in its narrow plot of soil. The French founded the city in 1778, a time when the American Revolutionary War was raging, the penal colony of Australia was still just an idea and much of Africa remained untouched by Europeans. The new settlement – which was by all accounts a modest place of timber-and-granite houses, an army barracks and pens for keeping tortoises – was named, rather more grandly, L'Établissement du Roi (“the King’s establishment”).

Little was done to grow the new city, either by the French who first built it or the British who took it over in 1811. It was a harbour, a port, a convenient waystation en route to elsewhere. So small and unimportant was it that it took the British 30 years to change the name to Victoria; they did so in 1841 to commemorate the queen's royal marriage to Prince Albert.

Its history was, for the most part, a minor affair for much of the 19th Century. After heavy rains, an avalanche of mud and granite rained down upon the city on 12 October 1862; many were killed. In 1890, the Swiss-owned Hotel Equateur opened, a precursor to the deluge of tourist business that would one day come to define Seychelles.

 

Perhaps the oldest extant building in Victoria is now, appropriately, the National Museum of History. With its engaging mix of written information panels and wall-to-ceiling displays, it tells the story of earliest colonial times, the freeing of slaves and the resulting history of Creole culture. Many established histories of the city speak of Victoria's (and Seychelles') colonial history, understandably so as it was the French and the British who would leave behind the architectural landmarks. But on 1 February 1835, 6,521 slaves were set free on Seychelles. The entire population at the time was just 7,500; nearly 90% of these were freed slaves and they would become the foundation upon which a Creole nation was established.

 

Originally built in 1885, formerly the building of the Supreme Court of Seychelles, the museum was restored in 2018 and remains a light and airy structure of wooden shutters and soaring ceilings surrounded by a palm-filled garden. It occupies the corner of Independence Avenue and Francis Rachel Street.

 

In the heart of this intersection and visible from the museum grounds is one of Victoria's more curious monuments: a miniature replica of the clocktower known as Little Ben that stands on Vauxhall Bridge Road in London. It was brought to Victoria in 1903 and serves as a suitably diminutive signpost for a city that can never grow any bigger.

 

The "city" is a dense tangle of automobiles and people, horns and brilliant fabrics inside the tightly packed streets and lanes that make up Victoria's genuine hub. The city becomes a mix of yelling fishmongers and fresh goods ranging from coconuts and plantains to vanilla pods and chiles around the covered Sir Selwyn Selwyn-Clarke Market. Old-school timber commerce warehouses in fading colors share street frontage with a glass-walled casino on Albert Street. The Domus, with its ornate balconied exterior, is nearby (a residence for the church hierarchy, built in 1934). The Hindu Sri Navasakthi Vinyagar Temple rises among the modern structures on Quincy Street.

 

"People think Seychelles is all about beaches," said Connie Patel, local trader, amateur historian and lifelong Victorian. "And, of course, the beaches are important. But everything from Seychelles is here. There aren't many roads here on Mahé; nearly all of them pass through Victoria. If you want to see where ordinary Seychellois come to do business away from tourism, Victoria is where it happens. It's an essential part of the Seychelles story."

 

Resident Geetika Patel, agreed: "Victoria is a window on the real Seychelles. It can be loud and messy and we all complain about the traffic. But this is modern Seychelles. Look around you. It's a melting pot of faces and architecture that tells you a lot about who we are. Listen, and you'll hear everyone talking in Creole. You can't say you understand Seychelles unless you've been here."

 

Up the hill, above the city and off Revolution Avenue, Marie-Antoinette Restaurant occupies an old home where, in the 1870s, Welsh-American journalist and explorer Henry Morton Stanley stayed for a month on his way back from Africa and his celebrated encounter with Dr David Livingstone. Stanley had been sent by a US newspaper to find Livingstone, who had lost contact with the outside world years earlier; it was at their first meeting on this trip that Stanley uttered the now-famous words, "Dr Livingstone, I presume?". Upon his arrival in Seychelles on his way home, Stanley missed a French postal ship by a day and was marooned in Seychelles for a month while he waited for passage back to Europe. Built entirely of wood, sporting towers and turrets, the building is yet another signpost to a little-known past.