Aldabra
— — an island the tortoises had first.
Not only on a wall.
“Aldabra is the second-largest coral atoll on earth, four long islands ringing a tidal lagoon thirty-four kilometres across. It lies 1,150 kilometres southwest of Mahé, closer to Madagascar than to the rest of Seychelles, and most of what lives there lives nowhere else. The giant tortoises — roughly 100,000 of them — outnumber every other large animal on the atoll. No road, no airstrip, no village. A small research station, the tide, and the wind. from the studio
Aldabra, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Aldabra is a raised coral atoll in the western Indian Ocean, the second-largest atoll on earth after Kiritimati, made up of four main islands — Grande Terre, Malabar, Picard, and Polymnie — wrapped around a shallow tidal lagoon roughly 34 kilometres long and 14 kilometres wide. It sits about 1,150 kilometres southwest of Mahé and 420 kilometres northwest of Madagascar, and is administered as part of the Outer Islands of Seychelles. UNESCO inscribed Aldabra as a World Heritage Site in 1982 and the Seychelles Islands Foundation has managed it as a strict nature reserve since 1979.
There is no resident human population on Aldabra. A research station on Picard Island, run by the Seychelles Islands Foundation, hosts a small rotating team of staff and scientists — typically a dozen or so people on the atoll at any time. There is no airstrip; access is by ship from Mahé, a passage of several days. Tourism is tightly limited and only by prior arrangement. What you hear instead is the trade wind, the lagoon emptying twice a day through the channels at speeds that can exceed eight knots, and at dusk the calls of the white-throated rail, the last flightless bird of the Indian Ocean.
Aldabra holds the largest population of giant tortoises on earth — roughly 100,000 Aldabrachelys gigantea, a number that has actually grown under SIF protection from a low point in the nineteenth century, when the species was nearly hunted out for meat by passing vessels. The atoll is also a major breeding site for green turtles, with several hundred females nesting each year on its beaches, and supports the world's second-largest colony of frigatebirds. The southeast trade winds blow from May to October, the northwest monsoon from November to April, and cyclones are rare this far north of the main track.