Heritage & Culture

Seychellois food is a Creole kitchen built on an ocean and a plantation economy, and its clearest expression is a fish market in Victoria.

Seychelles had no indigenous population, so everything here was carried in. Its Creole culture is what the people brought and what survived.

Seychelles is on the Indian Ocean slave route, not the Atlantic one, and it has a mountain school built for the children of liberated Africans.

A palm forest on Praslin kept almost in its original state, and home to the coco de mer, which produces the largest seed in the plant kingdom.

The first island of the group ever sighted, in 1609, and one whose heritage case rests on Creole tradition as much as on its wildlife.

Four coral islands around a lagoon, so hard to reach that they were never spoiled. Some 152,000 giant tortoises live there, the world's largest population.

A school built in 1876 for the children of liberated Africans, high on a mountain on Mahé, and a stop on the Indian Ocean slave route.

Ethiopia keeps its own calendar, its own clock and its own alphabet, and it is the only African country never formally colonized.

Ethiopian eating is communal, seasoned by a fasting calendar most visitors never hear about, and built on a grain grown almost nowhere else.

Ethiopia never became a diaspora through the Atlantic trade, and the reconnection it offers is a different one. There is also a warning to read.

A walled city said to be the fourth holiest in Islam, with 82 mosques inside it. It is also the one site in this cluster you can reach.

Eleven churches cut down into living rock, and the most significant heritage site in Ethiopia. It is also in a region closed to all travel.