Swimming with seahorses on Mozambique’s Bazaruto archipelago

I am at breakfast on Benguerra Island off the coast of Mozambique, overlooking a wide beach at low tide. Warm trade winds are rattling the palm trees. Among sand banks and the curl of waves, turquoise shallows are shading into patterns of deeper azure. Over a bowl of fruit, some too exotic to find English names for, I am thinking about the slow waltz of seahorses, about sea turtles navigating the oceans, and about mermaids. Mermaids are one of the reasons I have come here.

Not a great deal has changed on this beach since Vasco da Gama, the Portuguese explorer, passed nearby in 1498 on his landmark voyage to India. Boys are running along the lip of the ocean, dark figures against the white sands, two women pass with colourful bundles on their heads, a fishing boat is hauled up on the shore, villagers converging on its laden net. Far off in the Mozambique Channel, a couple of red dhow sails are tipped leeward. Beyond is the heavy bulk of the mainland, the rough textured hills looking like the backs of elephants. The recent tragic floods in much of Mozambique have left these islands untouched; they are their own world.

The Indian Ocean has its fair share of glamorous tropical islands, many heaving with luxury resorts: the Maldives, the Seychelles, Mauritius. But the five islands of the Bazaruto archipelago feel different. On Benguerra, you feel you have come to Africa, not to an incongruous oasis of sun loungers and infinity pools. There are luxury hotels, six of them across the archipelago, including the fabulous — and fabulously expensive — Kisawa Sanctuary. But they are discreet and well-mannered. They leave these islands to be resolutely themselves.

Benguerra, the second largest island in the archipelago (though only 4km wide and 7km long), is about 40 minutes by speedboat from the mainland port of Vilankulo. On the island, there are no roads beyond sand tracks, no marinas, no anchored yachts, no jet skiers, no shops bulging with beachwear and tacky souvenirs. You don’t have the sense that you have been followed here, halfway around the planet, by brand names and overpriced sunglasses, by the clutter and chatter and commercialism of our world. A short stroll from the Azura Marlin resort on my first morning brought me, not to a floating restaurant with underwater lighting and a sushi menu, but to the friendly village of Chirringome.

In the village, a scattering of round mud and thatch tukuls, women passed with babies strapped to their backs as haughty geese patrolled in small convoys. Round a corner an elderly woman was brewing cassava beer in a huge barrel under a tree, stirring the frothy mixture like a witch’s brew. Fishermen were mending nets, boys were happily thumping one another, while elderly women tended lunch pots bubbling on cooking fires. In an open space of beaten earth, I found a dozen young girls rehearsing a dance routine under the watchful eye of a teacher who clapped his hands and counted the steps. The musical accompaniment was flailing percussion — an energetic boy with a stick, an African drum and a homemade cymbal.   

The owner of a neighbouring bar of corrugated metal wandered over for a chat and an invitation to lunch. A group of half a dozen fishermen seated on a long bench were gorging themselves on ripe mangoes lifted from a bucket brimming with fruit. I joined the mango orgy and, with juice running down my chin, we talked fishing. Their complaints were those of fishermen everywhere: fishing stocks are down. 

---

The islands feel like sand banks adrift in the embrace of the Mozambique Channel. The ocean is the backdrop, framing every view, changing from hour to hour as the light shifts and winds rise and fall. It is also the soundtrack, the murmur of the surf, the retreating wash of the tides. Sometimes in the night, the crash of waves would wake me and for a moment I felt I was on a ship. Then in the predawn, the unfamiliar bird calls — the islands are home to more than 150 species — would carry me back to land.  

In the mornings, I walked the beaches, delighted with shells and driftwood and sentinel herons, still as statues on the shoreline, waiting patiently for breakfast. At night, I lay on the sand slopes watching the strange constellations of the southern hemisphere. I felt I was stranded on a desert island without the discs.

With little infrastructure, limited agricultural opportunity and a small population, the whole archipelago is insubstantial and vulnerable. Recent decades could have seen a slow drain of people away from the islands to the security and the opportunities of the mainland. But conservation and tourism is helping to support island life.

Two conservation initiatives are at work here. The first is the Bazaruto Archipelago National Park, a marine reserve run by African Parks, an NGO that manages vulnerable game parks across the continent. They protect the marine habitats, patrol the waters to keep large international fishing trawlers out, and encourage sustainable practice among the local fishermen. Complementary to their operations are those of the Bazaruto Centre for Scientific Studies, established by Nina Flohr, the founder of Kisawa Sanctuary. Its mission is to collect the data that might point to sustainable conservation solutions, while also offering islanders an alternative and more reliable income than fishing. Almost 80 per cent of BCSS’s staff are local villagers.

On Benguerra, the resorts have clubbed together to build the island’s first school and its first clinic. They have improved connections to the mainland which in the past were often difficult journeys by dhow. There is talk of a solar panel project — the island has no electricity beyond small household solar panels. But it is employment that is the chief benefit. All the mango eaters had members of their families working in resorts. Fishing may still be central to the archipelago but it is tourism, and the initiatives it funds, that has brought wider opportunities to these islands. 

---

One afternoon I went to find the seahorses. Sara Vital, the dive master at Azura, became aware of the seahorse populations in the Mozambique Channel when she came across a fisherman harvesting them for the Chinese medicine trade (the animals, along with everything from bear’s bile to tiger penises, are deemed to be a cure for impotence). To help conserve this unique species, Vital has created a protected marine area of shallow sea grass beds, the vulnerable habitat for seahorses.   

With snorkel and mask, I peered down at the long-bladed grasses floating balletically in the currents. Then I spotted them, tiny creatures, their tails wrapped around the stems of the grasses. One of the ocean’s most surreal creatures, seahorses are poor swimmers, with a top speed of only 1.5 metres an hour, so they prefer to spend much of their time anchored like this, waiting for snacks — generally minute crustaceans — to pass within striking range.

Seahorse courtship is an elaborate affair, over the course of several days. They swim side by side holding tails, they change colour, they shudder, they quiver, they wheel about in unison. The whole thing comes to a climax as they drift upward, snout to snout, spiralling as they go, in a kind of slow waltz. When the female deposits her eggs in the male’s pouch, he inseminates them and then carries the eggs until they hatch, at which point he gives birth to the live young with a series of contractions.

Another day I dived the Two Mile Reef, sinking into the blue abyss to glide over the top of immaculate coral reefs where angelfish, Moorish idols, moon wrasses, and blackspotted sweetlips sailed through channels of aqueous light. When I turned my head, a stingray passed, flapping its wide fins in elegant slow motion. A hawksbill sea turtle appeared, gazing up at me with her wise old face. Having travelled thousands of miles, navigating entire oceans, she was on her way home, to the island beach of her birth to lay her eggs.

But I had not come for seahorses or stingrays or even the beautiful hawksbill turtles, now listed as critically endangered. I had come for mermaids. The waters around the Bazaruto archipelago are home to the last dugongs in the western Indian Ocean, a population of 200 or so. Conservation efforts here are focused on their survival.

In numerous cultures around the world, the sighting of this strangest of marine mammals has inspired legends about mermaids. It can’t be their looks. In an underwater world of streamlined elegance, dugongs stand out as clumsy, almost oafish. They have flattened faces, beady eyes, and fat downturned snouts. Related to elephants, they can grow up to 300kg and look like dolphins with a weight problem.  

But wherever they are found, dugongs have a mythic quality. Christopher Columbus reported seeing mermaids in the Caribbean; it is thought he had actually spotted manatees, a close cousin of the dugong (both are sea cows, or more formally sirenians, a name derived from the sirens of Greek mythology). Along the coasts of East Asia, local legend insists that dugongs were originally human, and it is considered bad luck if they are inadvertently captured in fishing nets. In the Gulf states their tusks are used for ceremonial sword handles. In Vietnam and Cambodia, their tears are thought to be an aphrodisiac. In the tiny Aragusuku Islands off the coast of Japan, dugong skulls are preserved in utaki, sacred groves, as ritual objects. Out on the ocean every day, among seas so blue they made me dizzy, we scanned the waves for mermaids.  

---

I stayed at the two delightful Azura resorts, Azura Benguerra and Azura Marlin, both astride beaches of squeaky white sands. Azura Marlin is a more modernist creation, with just 10 villas and a striking blue and white colour scheme that mirrors the seascapes it overlooks. Azura Benguerra is a more traditional affair of 20 spacious thatched villas, all with private pools, a few steps from a never-ending beach. The main bar and restaurant at the latter has the feel of a charming nautical clubhouse. Romantics are served dinner at lantern-lit beach tables by the lap of the waves, while the dive centre organises excursions and island tours that take guests to colossal dunes for sand boarding and to a lake with a relic population of crocodiles and flamingos.

But it is Kisawa Sanctuary that is the star turn on Benguerra, the creation of Nina Flohr, daughter of the Swiss founder of private jet company VistaJet (and through her marriage to Prince Philippos, a member of the Greek and Danish royal families). The resort has eight villas, with between one and three bedrooms, set in 300 hectares of forest and dunes wrapped round with wild beaches.

Each villa (or “residence”) comes with its own private pool, a butler, a well-stocked complimentary bar, and an electric Mini Moke that you can drive to your dinner dates in the elegant Main Terrace restaurant or the funky beachfront Baracca. With a palette of almond- and straw-coloured tones, Kisawa echoes its setting, this sand island, these endless beaches, set off by sophisticated design details — elegant African baskets, colossal Malabar Coast doors, sculptural baths and chairs.  

But Bazaruto had its disappointment. Everyone else seemed to have wonderful sightings of the dugongs. If Columbus, who rarely knew what he was looking at, saw the sea cows, surely so should I? But the mermaids never appeared. Myths can be illusive. It is a reason, if I needed one, to come back.

Find out about our latest stories first — follow FT Weekend on Instagram, Bluesky and X, and sign up to receive the FT Weekend newsletter every Saturday morning