Seychelles is a small island country east of the African continent's mainland located in the Sea of Zanj due north of Madagascar, with Antsiranana as its nearest foreign city. Seychelles lies between approximately 4ºS and 10ºS and 46ºE and 54ºE. The nation is an archipelago of 155 tropical islands, some granite and some coral. the majority of which are small and uninhabited. The landmass is only , but the islands are spread wide over an exclusive economic zone of . About 90 percent of the population of 100,000 live on Mahé, 9 percent on Praslin and La Digue. Around a third of the land area is the island of Mahé and a further third the atoll of Aldabra.
There are two distinct regions, the granitic islands, the world's only oceanic islands of granitic rock and the coralline outer islands. The granite islands are the world's oldest ocean islands, while the outer islands are mainly very young, though the Aldabra group and St Pierre (Farquhar Group) are unusual, raised coral islands that have emerged and submerged several times during their long history, the most recent submergence dating from about 125,000 years ago
Physical features
The archipelago consists of 155 islands and thirty prominent rock formations scattered throughout a self-proclaimed exclusive economic zone of more than of ocean. Some forty islands are granitic and lie in a radius from Mahé, the main island. The remaining islands are coralline, stretching over a radius from Ile Aux Vaches in the northeast to the Aldabra Atoll in the southwest. The country's Inner Islands are the granitic islands plus two nearby coralline islands, Bird Island and Denis Island. The remaining coralline islands are the Outer Islands. The islands are all small—the aggregate land area is only .
Mahé is long and no more than wide, with an area of . It contains the capital and only city, Victoria, an excellent port. Victoria lies approximately east of Mombasa, Kenya; southwest of Mumbai; north of Mauritius; and northeast of Madagascar. The only other important islands by virtue of their size and population are Praslin and La Digue, situated about thirty kilometers to the northeast of Mahé.
The granitic islands are founded on a fragment separated from the Indian continental plate during the Palaeocene about 66 million years ago during the break up of the supercontinent of Gondwana. This break-up was associated with the volcanic activity that built the Mascarene Plateau. These granitic islands are characterized by boulder-covered hills and mountains as high as rising abruptly from the sea. Elsewhere, narrow coastal plains extend to the base of the foothills. Extensively developed coral reefs are found mainly on the east coasts because of the southwest trade winds and equatorial current. Ninety-nine percent of the population is located on the granitic islands, and most are on Mahé.
The coralline islands differ sharply from the granitic in that they are very flat, often rising only a few feet (one meter) above sea level. They have no fresh water, and very few have a resident population. Many, like Ile aux Vaches, Ile Denis, the Amirante Isles, Platte Island, and Coetivy Island, are sand cays upon which extensive coconut plantations have been established. Some of the coralline islands consist of uplifted reefs and atolls covered with stunted vegetation. Several of these islands have been important breeding grounds for turtles and birds, as well as the sites of extensive guano deposits, which formerly constituted an important element of the Seychellois economy but now for the most part are depleted. The Aldabra Islands, the largest coralline atoll with an area greater than Mahe, are a sanctuary for rare animals and birds.
The five groups of coralline islands that make up the Outer Islands are Southern Coral Group (a collective term for Île Platte and Coëtivy Island), Amirante Islands, Alphonse Group (Alphonse Atoll and St. François Atoll), Aldabra Group (Aldabra Atoll, Assumption Island, and the Cosmoledo Group, consisting of Cosmoledo Atoll and Astove Island), and Farquhar Group (Farquhar Atoll, Providence Atoll and St. Pierre Island).