Indian Ocean

55 records: the Maldives, the Seychelles, Mauritius, Sri Lanka and the islands between. The region where an entire island is the ordinary unit rather than the exception, and where this collection therefore has to work hardest to say something its island sister does not.

The answer turns out to be what each island is used for. Soneva Fushi kept Kunfunadhoo as forest and hid the villas inside it. Gili Lankanfushi owns its island and sleeps nobody on it — every villa stands over the lagoon and the land carries the kitchens. Huvafen Fushi gave each villa a pool, which on a small island is a rule of land use rather than an amenity. Reethi Rah built more than half of itself out of the lagoon to manufacture twelve beaches. One archipelago, four different theories of ground.

The Seychelles contribute the register's two clearest cases of land held to be repaired rather than used. North Island carries eleven villas on five hundred acres and built them from timber cleared during the island's rewilding. Frégate holds seven hundred and forty acres, sixteen villas, and 2,200 resident tortoises that outnumber the guests fifty-five to one.

What almost nothing here publishes is an area. Of the Indian Ocean records written so far, not one carries a confirmed figure for its own site; the dimensions that exist came from reviewers pacing islands, not from the houses that own them.