Hundreds of giant tortoises now wander freely across Curieuse Island, and almost every visitor who photographs them assumes they've always been there. They haven't. The island's original tortoise population was hunted into extinction generations ago, and the ones roaming the trails today were placed there on purpose, decades later, as part of an effort to give the island a different kind of history.
Curieuse sits a short boat ride off the coast of Praslin. Most visits begin at Baie Laraie, following a guided trail through mangrove forest thick with crabs and native spice plants, before opening onto Anse Laraie, where the tortoises live. From there, a quick hop by boat reaches St. Pierre Islet, home to some of the richest coral in the area and no tortoises at all.
The island's soil runs a deep, distinctive red, which is exactly why French sailors first named it Ile Rouge, the Red Island, before renaming it Curieuse in 1768 after their own schooner.
Nearly a Century and a Half of Quarantine
In 1829, the island was acquired for a purpose most visitors would never guess while standing on its beaches: it became a leper colony. From 1833 until 1965, patients with leprosy from across the Seychelles archipelago were sent to Curieuse and kept there, separated from friends and family, for well over a hundred years.
The settlement itself was called Anse St. Joseph, and the physician assigned to the patients' care lived in a colonial villa on the grounds. That building, now known as the Doctor's House, still stands. It has since been restored into a small museum, one of the few physical traces left of what the island spent well over a century being used for.
What Brought the Tortoises Back
Between 1978 and 1982, conservationists made a deliberate decision to relocate Aldabra giant tortoises to Curieuse, aiming to help the island recover ecologically, and, in a quieter sense, to give it a purpose beyond what it had spent nearly 150 years being used for. Today the population numbers over 500 by some counts, and most visitors walking past them never learn the animals are recent arrivals rather than original residents.
Two Histories, Walked in the Same Afternoon
Curieuse now functions as a protected marine national park, its trails full of tortoises and its waters full of coral, and there's nothing wrong with visiting purely for that. But the island carries two histories layered on top of each other: one of isolation and loss stretching across generations, and a second, more recent one built deliberately to restore what the first had taken away. Every visitor walking those mangrove trails today is, in a small way, part of how that second chapter continues.