The islands were part of India until about sixty-six million years ago. Almost nothing else on this page is as surprising as that, and all of it is checkable.
India and Seychelles
Same rock, same ocean, same monsoon calendar, and a gopuram in the middle of the capital. This is the whole of it, with the sources attached.
Start with the rock, not with the diplomacy
Most pages that pair two countries have to hunt for a connection. This one has the opposite problem. There is too much material and a good deal of it is unexpected, and the largest single fact is in no brochure anywhere: the islands you are flying to were physically joined to India, and the event that separated them is the same event that laid down the Deccan.
What follows is the whole of it in order. The rock, the landing list of 1770, the shipping out of Bombay, the currency ordinance, the temple, the census, the trade table and the aid. Every number carries a source and every source is linked at the bottom of the page. Where our own notes had something wrong, the correction is printed rather than quietly patched.
The photograph above: Andrew Moore from Johannesburg, South Africa, CC BY-SA 2.0
The islands are a piece of India that stayed behind
The granite the Seychelles are made of cooled about 750 million years ago, in the late Precambrian, as part of the same crust as peninsular India. When Gondwana began to come apart in the middle Jurassic, the eastern half of it, Antarctica and Madagascar and India and Australia, moved away from Africa together. Between about 95 and 84 million years ago a rift separated the Seychelles and India block from Madagascar and carried it north. Around 66 million years ago the rifting jumped, severed Seychelles from India and opened the Carlsberg Ridge, which is still spreading today.
That jump happened at the peak of the eruptions that built the Deccan Traps. The same geological event that laid the basalt under Nashik and Pune is the event that set these islands adrift. Volcanic rock found on the Seychelles plateau has been linked to the same episode.
This is not a curiosity. It is why the country looks the way it does. Almost every island nation in the tropics is coral or volcano. Seychelles is neither. It is a continental fragment, which is why the beaches have those enormous rounded boulders standing in them and why the interior of Mahé is a granite mountain range. Alfred Wegener used these outcrops as early evidence when he was arguing that continents move at all.
The bus at the terminal was built in India
Tata supplied most of the bus fleet that runs on Mahé and Praslin, and Ashok Leyland is a newer entrant. A cash grant of 3.5 million dollars paid for 71 of them and six light vehicles, and a further sixty arrived between February 2023 and September 2024 under a line of credit.
The bus in this photograph carries a small sticker on its front panel, beside the Tata badge, in the colours of the Indian flag. You will not pick it out at this size and you will see it from the kerb. None of this is a symbolic connection between two countries. It is the vehicle you flag down at Beau Vallon.
Five names on the first list
The first permanent settlement in Seychelles was put ashore on Sainte Anne, the island you can see from the Victoria waterfront, in August 1770. India's own foreign ministry records the party as five Indians, seven Africans and fifteen French colonists, and calls them the first inhabitants of the islands.
The two governments describe those five people differently. The Indian brief calls them plantation workers. The Seychelles record of the same landing counts the non-European members of the party as slaves. We are not going to pretend to settle that, and it matters less than what both accounts agree on, which is that five of the fewer than thirty people who founded this country were Indian, and that they were here from the first day there was anybody here at all.
There is no indigenous population in Seychelles and no pre-colonial history to displace. Every Seychellois descends from somebody who arrived, and the Indian arrival is not a later addition to that story. It is in the first sentence of it.
Bombay, and the ships that followed
On India's own account of it, the islands were administered for a period under British rule from the Bombay Presidency, with regular shipping and a steady flow of goods and essential commodities coming down from India. After the abolition of slavery the plantations were worked in part by indentured labour brought from India, on the same pattern as Mauritius. The trade links that came with the shipping did the rest.
A merchant community followed the cargo. It came first from Tamil Nadu and Puducherry and later from Gujarat, and it arrived as traders, labourers and construction workers, and more recently as professionals. That sequence is why the shop signs in Victoria read the way they do, why the temple is Dravidian rather than north Indian, and why the two languages you will hear in an Indian family here are usually Tamil and Gujarati.
Two hundred and fifty years, in order.
Deep time first, then human time. Every row below traces to one of the eleven sources printed at the foot of this page.
The granite that the islands are made of cools and hardens, part of the same crust as peninsular India.
Rifting severs Seychelles from India and opens the Carlsberg Ridge. It happens at the peak of the eruptions that laid down the Deccan Traps.
Vasco da Gama's fourth Portuguese India armada sights the islands on the run between Africa and the Malabar coast. Nobody lands.
The first permanent settlement is put ashore on Sainte Anne. India's own account of it records five Indians among fewer than thirty people.
Under British rule the islands are worked partly by indentured labour brought from India, and a merchant community follows the shipping.
The Paper Currency Ordinance creates a Seychelles rupee whose notes are worth their face value in Indian rupees.
Seychelles becomes independent on 29 June. A contingent from INS Nilgiri marches in the Independence Day parade and the two countries open diplomatic relations.
Bank of Baroda opens a branch in Victoria. It is still there.
India opens a mission in Victoria, run at first by the High Commissioner in Dar es Salaam.
INS Vindhyagiri extends a scheduled port call in Victoria and a coup against President René does not happen.
The first resident Indian High Commissioner takes up post in Victoria.
The Arul Mihu Navasakthi Vinayagar temple is consecrated on Quincy Street in May, the first and still the only Hindu temple in the country.
The government recognises Taippoosam Kavadi as a holiday for Hindus.
Bharti Airtel begins building the mobile and internet network. India's foreign ministry puts the investment since then at more than twenty-five million dollars.
Seychelles opens its own resident mission in New Delhi.
Narendra Modi visits in March, the first Indian prime ministerial visit in thirty-four years, and India announces three months of gratis visas for Seychellois travellers.
Seychelles is among the first countries to receive Indian vaccine, fifty thousand doses of Covishield in January.
A statue of Mahatma Gandhi is put up in the Peace Park in Victoria, among the figures of Nelson Mandela and Sir James Mancham.
India exports 76.19 million dollars of goods to Seychelles and buys 8.69 million back, and delivers a further sixty buses.
What the 2022 census actually counted
There were 5,508 Hindus in Seychelles at the 2022 census, 5.4 per cent of the population and the second largest religion in the country after Christianity. That is a steep climb. The same series counted 506 in 1987, 953 in 1994, 1,700 in 2002 and 2,174 in 2010.
The distribution is not even. Cascade district on Mahé is a fifth Hindu. Takamaka is nine per cent, Anse Etoile eight, Roche Caiman just under eight, Saint Louis six. Several of the tiny outer island stations, places with populations counted in tens, are recorded as entirely Hindu, because the people living on them are almost all Indian workers on employment permits.
Three separate numbers get confused in conversation and they measure three different things. India's own brief of August 2024 put people of Indian origin holding Seychellois citizenship at about five thousand, and counted more than seven thousand Indian nationals here on gainful employment permits on top of that. The same census that found 5,508 Hindus put the whole population of the country at a little over 102,000. Neither of the Indian estimates is the Hindu figure. Plenty of Seychellois of Indian descent are Catholic or Muslim, and plenty of the permit holders will go home.
How many of us actually come
In the whole of 2025, 13,407 people resident in India arrived in Seychelles. The country took 393,777 visitors that year, so India was 3.4 per cent of them, a little over one arrival in thirty. Inside Asia only two lines on the table are bigger, the United Arab Emirates at 20,900 and Israel at 15,475.
The interesting part is the shape rather than the size. India sent 7,602 people in 2023 and 7,585 in 2024, which is the same number twice. Then it sent 13,407. That is a rise of 77 per cent in a single year, and of the markets anywhere near that size only Israel grew faster. India now sends more people to these islands than Poland does, more than the whole of Scandinavia, and more than Spain and Portugal together. It sends more than half as many again as Austria. It is still a little behind the United States.
| Country of residence | 2025 | 2024 | 2023 |
|---|---|---|---|
| United Arab Emirates | 20,900 | 19,697 | 16,399 |
| Israel | 15,475 | 8,521 | 12,944 |
| India | 13,407 | 7,585 | 7,602 |
| China | 5,213 | 3,276 | 2,171 |
| Indian Sub Continent | 1,403 | 1,422 | 1,232 |
Seychelles took 393,777 visitors in all in 2025, against 350,701 in 2024. Source: the National Bureau of Statistics weekly bulletin for week 52 of 2025, Table 1. Country of residence, not nationality.
Read the column heading before you quote any of that anywhere. The statistics office classifies every visitor by country of residence and says so in its own method note, not by nationality and not by descent. The India line is people who live in India. An Indian family living in Dubai is counted in the Emirates line, which is the largest in Asia, and a British Indian is counted in the United Kingdom line. The number of people of Indian origin who walk through that airport in a year is therefore larger than 13,407, and nobody publishes it. The bulletin also keeps a separate row called Indian Sub Continent, 1,403 people in 2025, and does not say which countries it puts in it, so neither do we.
This year is going the other way and a page that printed the 77 per cent and stopped would be selling you last year's news. Through the week ending 30 August 2026, India had sent 8,663 people against 8,951 at the same point in 2025. That is down 3.2 per cent. The whole market is down 8.6 per cent over the same weeks and Asia as a region is down 13.5 per cent, so India is falling more slowly than the country it is flying to. Both of those are part years counted to the same week, which is the only way to compare them honestly.
What it means on the ground is simple enough. You will not be in a crowd of Indians and you will not be the only one. And with arrivals down across the board, the beaches this year are quieter than the photographs from last year suggest.
One arrival in fifteen is a honeymoon
Seychelles asks every arriving visitor the purpose of the visit and counts the answers in five boxes. Holiday, business, honeymoon, transit, and other. Honeymoon is not a marketing category here. It is a line in the national statistics.
In 2025 that line took 26,753 people, 6.8 per cent of everyone who arrived. It was 6.8 per cent in 2024 as well, on 23,817 people, and 7.4 per cent in 2023 on 25,737. Roughly one arrival in fifteen, steady for three years.
Count it carefully. The bulletin counts arrivals and not couples, so two people on the same honeymoon are two of those 26,753. Halve it in your head if you want a number of couples, but the statistics office does not do that arithmetic and we are not going to do it for them.
It explains a good deal about the country once you notice it. It is why so many rooms are built for exactly two people, why half the boat trips are sold as private charters, and why a resort asks what you are celebrating before it asks anything else. If that is why you are coming, our weddings pages are the working half of it.
Rice, and everything after it
The largest single thing India sends to Seychelles is rice, followed by other foodstuffs, cement, linen and cotton, vehicles and transport equipment, medicines and medical instruments. In July 2024 two hundred tonnes of non-basmati arrived under a special export waiver so that the country would not run short.
That is why the Victoria supermarkets carry atta and ghee and paneer and Indian spice brands, and why the market in this photograph is the answer to most vegetarian problems here. Creole cooking itself is built on fish, which our vegetarian page says plainly rather than pretending otherwise.
The photograph above: A.Savin, FAL
The days out
Island tours, boat days, snorkelling and walks, with real ratings, real review counts and free cancellation up to twenty-four hours before.
See the toursThe temple on Quincy Street
The Arul Mihu Navasakthi Vinayagar temple was consecrated in May 1992 and is the first and still the only Hindu temple in the country. It stands on Quincy Street, a short walk from the clock tower, and its gopuram stands over the roofs around it and is by a distance the most colourful thing in the centre of Victoria. Ganesha has been the presiding deity since 1999. Murugan, Nadarajah, Durga, Sreenivasa Perumal, Bhairawa and Chandekeswarar are in the inner mandapam.
It did not appear on its own. The Seychelles Hindu Kovil Sangam was organised in 1984 and the temple followed eight years later. Taippoosam Kavadi was first held in the inner courtyard in 1993 and now fills the outer courtyard and goes out through the town as a chariot procession. Since 1998 the government has recognised it as a holiday for Hindus.
Here is the correction. Our own build notes for this site said Diwali was a public holiday in Seychelles. It is not, and neither is Kavadi. The statutory list published by the Seychelles Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora runs to fourteen days and every one of them is Catholic or civic. Both festivals are kept at the temple, properly and publicly, and the shops and the ferries and the tour boats run as normal through them.
The rupee that is not your rupee
Seychelles has a rupee, and the reason it has one is India. The Paper Currency Ordinance of 1914 set up a currency board here, and the government notes it issued from that year were worth their face value in Indian rupees. The word survived the peg by more than a century.
It is a separate currency now and has been since long before independence, and the two are nowhere near each other in value. Do not do the mental arithmetic you would do at home. Almost everything sold to a visitor here is priced in euros anyway, including hotels, car hire, tours, transfers and the ferry.
What India sends, and what comes back
In 2023 to 2024 India exported goods worth 76.19 million dollars to Seychelles and bought 8.69 million dollars back, a total up almost fifteen per cent on the year before. India's own assessment of that is blunt. The trade is modest, and the main reason is that there is no direct shipping line between the two countries.
What comes down is rice above all, then other foodstuffs, cement, linen and cotton, vehicles and transport equipment, medicines and medical and dental instruments. In July 2024 two hundred tonnes of non-basmati rice arrived under a special export waiver granted so that the country would not run short.
The aid ledger is longer than the trade one. A cash grant of 3.5 million dollars bought 71 buses and six light vehicles for the public transport corporation, with a further sixty buses delivered between February 2023 and September 2024 under a line of credit. There were ten ambulances at 385,000 dollars, a magistrates court building at 3.45 million, a rebuilt coastal radar network at 4.7 million, a one megawatt solar plant at Romainville, a solar cold store on La Digue, and twenty-eight community development projects in the first phase alone. More than one per cent of the whole population of Seychelles has been through an Indian government training course.
In January 2021 Seychelles was among the first countries anywhere to receive Indian vaccine, fifty thousand doses of Covishield. Traffic runs the other way too. When Seychelles needs specialist treatment it does not send patients to Europe, it sends them to Chennai.
The Indian things you can walk to in Victoria
Most of what two governments do to each other is paperwork. A little of it ends up standing in a street where you can go and look at it, and in Victoria that list is longer than the size of the town suggests.
There is a statue of Mahatma Gandhi in Peace Park, put up in June 2022. It stands among statues of other leaders including Nelson Mandela and Sir James Mancham, the founding president of Seychelles. Bank of Baroda has had a branch in Victoria since 1978, which makes it one of the longest running Indian businesses in the country and a sign you will pass without meaning to. The IT Centre of Excellence at Mont Fleuri opened in April 2011. At Mont Fleuri Secondary School there has been an India Corner in the library since April 2024, with books on Indian art, philosophy, science and wildlife. And the magistrates court is the one in the aid ledger further up this page.
Victoria is also twinned with Panaji. The two city corporations signed the agreement in June 2018, which pairs the capital of Seychelles with the capital of Goa.
There may also be something on if you are here in the middle of August. In 2024 the two weeks running up to India's independence day were given over to a Seychelles India Day, and it was a public thing rather than an embassy reception. Friendly cricket matches for men and for women, a national chess tournament, visiting performers at the national auditorium and the history museum, and a food festival at the Roche Caiman complex to finish. We have not seen it confirmed as an annual fixture, so treat it as worth asking about rather than as a date to book around.
The traffic that goes the other way
Almost every list of what one country does for another runs in one direction, and this page has already run a long way in that direction. The return traffic is smaller and it is more interesting.
Seychelles sends its patients to India. India is the country of choice for specialised medical treatment here, and a Seychellois vice president went to Chennai in February 2017 to open a wing at the hospital that takes them. Seychelles sent two Aldabra giant tortoises to the zoo in Hyderabad in June 2018, which is the only item on this entire page that travelled north on four legs. India announced a three month free visa for Seychellois nationals in 2015, which is the arrangement running in the opposite direction to the one that lets you arrive here without applying for anything. And when the International Solar Alliance was founded, Seychelles ratified the framework in September 2017 and became one of its founding members, which is a small country signing up to the same instrument as the large one.
There is a quieter number underneath all of it. More than one per cent of the population of Seychelles has been through an Indian government training course under the ITEC programme. In a country of about a hundred thousand people that is over a thousand alumni, which is a different kind of link from a bus or a radar station and probably a more durable one.
Two Seychellois have received the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, India's honour for people of Indian origin abroad. Dr V. Ramadoss in 2006, and Justice D. Karunakaran of the Supreme Court of Seychelles in 2015.
The High Commission, and what it is for
India keeps a resident mission in Victoria. It has been there in some form since 1979 and with a resident High Commissioner since 1987, which for a country of a hundred thousand people is a considerable statement. Seychelles opened its own mission in New Delhi in 2008.
You will almost certainly never need it. It is worth knowing where it is anyway, because it is the place to go if a passport goes into the sea, and because the distance between the two states shows up in small conveniences. Seychellois travellers have had three months of gratis Indian visas since 2015. Indian travellers coming the other way do not need a visa at all, because Seychelles does not issue one to anybody.
High Commission of India, Victoria
3rd floor, Maison Esplanade
Francis Rachel Street
Victoria, Mahé
PO Box 488, Republic of Seychelles
- Consular, passport and visa services
- Monday to Friday, 08:30 to 16:30
- Applications accepted
- 08:30 to 12:00
- Documents returned
- 15:00 to 16:00
This is India's mission to Seychelles, not a tourist office and not us. It is the place to go for a passport, an emergency travel document, an OCI card or consular help, and it closes on both countries' holidays. Its telephone number and its email addresses are on its own contact page, which is linked below. We do not reprint anybody's phone number, including our own.
India in Seychelles, in six frames.
Six frames of the part of Seychelles this page is about. None of them is a beach.
Photographs, under Creative Commons: NorbertNagel, CC BY-SA 4.0 Florival fr, CC BY-SA 4.0 A.Savin, FAL Henning Leweke, CC BY-SA 2.0 mwanasimba from La Réunion, CC BY-SA 2.0 Fabio Achilli, CC BY 2.0
What any of this changes for your week
It changes more than you would think. English is an official language here and everybody in the tourist economy uses it, so nothing has to be negotiated in a language you do not have. There is no visa to apply for. There are Indian groceries in the Victoria supermarkets and Indian restaurants on Mahé and La Digue. One of the two mobile networks is Airtel. The bus you flag down at Beau Vallon was probably built by Tata.
The monsoon runs on a calendar you already know. The south-east trades and the north-west monsoon govern these islands exactly as they govern the Indian coast, and they govern which side of each island is calm. From December to March the sheltered coasts are the south and the east. From May to September they are the north and the west. April and October sit between the two systems and everything is calm at once.
And the temple is open. Take your shoes off, take your hat off, and walk in.
Four longer reads.
The temple on Quincy Street
A Dravidian gopuram in the middle of a Creole capital, and the community that put it there.
One ocean, and one rock
The islands were part of India until the Deccan eruptions pushed them away. The sea still runs on the same calendar.
Fifty years of the official relationship
What the two states have actually done for each other, in order, with the numbers attached.
The Indians who built Victoria
Five people in 1770, a merchant community that followed the British-era shipping, and the shop signs you will read on Market Street today.
Photographs, under Creative Commons: NorbertNagel, CC BY-SA 4.0 NorbertNagel, CC BY-SA 4.0 Radosław Botev, CC BY-SA 4.0 Radosław Botev, CC BY-SA 4.0
The part you can book.
Everything above is history. This is the working half of the site. Nothing here is sold over the phone, because there is no phone.
Weddings in Seychelles
A legal beach wedding with our own team, the paperwork handled and the mandap arranged if you want one.
Car hire
Ten cars, no deposit held, delivered to the airport, the jetty or your hotel.
Tours and excursions
Island days, boat trips, snorkelling and walks, with real ratings and free cancellation.
Airport transfers
A driver watching your flight number, at a price agreed in writing before you fly.
Photograph, under Creative Commons: Remi Jouan, CC BY-SA 3.0
What people ask.
Were Seychelles and India ever joined?
Yes, physically. The granite of the Seychelles cooled about 750 million years ago as part of the same continental crust as peninsular India, and rifting only severed the two about 66 million years ago, at the peak of the eruptions that laid down the Deccan Traps. Seychelles is a continental fragment rather than a coral or volcanic island group, which is why its beaches are full of granite boulders.
Is there a Hindu temple in Seychelles?
One. The Arul Mihu Navasakthi Vinayagar temple on Quincy Street in Victoria, consecrated in May 1992, with Ganesha as the presiding deity. Visitors are welcome. Shoes and headgear come off at the door. Our page on the temple has the detail.
Is Diwali a public holiday in Seychelles?
No, and neither is Kavadi. The statutory list of public holidays published by the Seychelles Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora runs to fourteen days and every one of them is Catholic or civic. What is true is narrower. Since 1998 the government has recognised Taippoosam Kavadi as a holiday for Hindus. Both festivals are kept at the temple in Victoria and nothing else in the country closes for them.
How many Indians live in Seychelles?
Three numbers, three meanings. The 2022 census counted 5,508 Hindus, 5.4 per cent of a total population of a little over 102,000. India's own brief of August 2024 put people of Indian origin holding Seychellois citizenship at about five thousand and counted more than seven thousand Indian nationals on employment permits separately. The three overlap but none of them is a count of the others.
Do Indian passport holders need a visa for Seychelles?
No. Seychelles does not issue tourist visas to any nationality. A visitor's permit is granted at the border on arrival, subject to conditions, and an online travel authorisation has to be held before you board. Our entry page sets out exactly what immigration asks for.
Is Hindi spoken in Seychelles?
Not as a local language. The official languages are Seychellois Creole, English and French, and English will carry you through the entire trip. Within Indian families here the home languages are usually Tamil or Gujarati, because that is where the community came from, and you will hear Hindi among workers who arrived more recently.
Can I get vegetarian food in Seychelles?
Yes, with planning. Creole cooking is built on fish rather than garnished with it, so a hotel kitchen has to be told in advance, but the Victoria supermarkets carry rice, lentils, atta, ghee, paneer and Indian spice brands, and self-catering settles the question outright. Our vegetarian and Jain page is the honest version.
Does India have an embassy in Seychelles?
A High Commission, which is what an Indian mission in a fellow Commonwealth country is called. It is on the third floor of Maison Esplanade on Francis Rachel Street in Victoria, it has been resident since 1987, and its own site carries its contact details and its holiday closures.
What is true here, and what we do not claim
Every figure above traces to one of the sources printed at the foot of this page and each one is linked. The arrival counts and the honeymoon counts are the Seychelles government's own weekly bulletins. The aid, the trade and the agreements are India's own bilateral brief. The census religion figures are the 2022 census. Where a number is a part year rather than a full one, the page says which weeks it covers, because comparing eight months against twelve is the easiest way to publish a fall that never happened.
Where our own working notes for this site were wrong, the correction is printed on the page rather than quietly deleted. The note that said Diwali was a public holiday in Seychelles was checked against the government's published list and thrown out, and the section above says so.
There are things this page deliberately does not do. It does not put a number on how many people of Indian origin live in Seychelles, because three different official figures measure three different groups and adding them together would produce a number that is not true of anybody. It does not print rules about getting married here that we cannot stand behind, and our wedding pages are the same. It does not take a side in any argument that belongs to Seychellois voters, because this is a travel site owned by a Seychellois and that is not its business. And it prints no telephone number, not ours and not anybody else's.
If something here is wrong, we would rather know. The planning form goes to a person.
Where every fact on this page comes from
- Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India, India-Seychelles Bilateral Relations, brief dated 27 August 2024, source
- High Commission of India, Victoria, contact and office hours, source
- Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora, Republic of Seychelles, list of public holidays, source
- National Bureau of Statistics, Seychelles, Population and Housing Census 2022, source
- Hinduism in Seychelles, for the census religion series and the temple's consecration, source
- Seychelles microcontinent, for the rifting dates and the Deccan connection, source
- Seychellois rupee, for the 1914 currency ordinance, source
- Operation Flowers are Blooming, for the 1986 naval visit, source
- Seychelles, for the 1503 sighting and for the Seychellois account of the 1770 landing, source
- National Bureau of Statistics, Seychelles, Weekly Visitor Arrivals, bulletin VASB52 2025, released 31 December 2025, for the complete 2025 calendar year, source
- National Bureau of Statistics, Seychelles, Weekly Visitor Arrivals, bulletin VASB35 2026, released 2 September 2026, for the year so far, source
Six of these eleven are first-party. India's own foreign ministry, India's own High Commission in Victoria, the Seychelles foreign ministry and the Seychelles statistics bureau, the last of those three times over. Nothing on these pages comes from a travel site, a listing or a directory, and for most of these facts those were what search returned first. Every link was checked before publication. Figures move, so check the source rather than us if a number matters to a decision.
Now plan the trip itself
Tell us the dates and the shape of the week and you will get a written answer with real prices in it. No call, no number to ring, and nothing sold to you in a hurry.