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The Amazing Story of the World’s Smallest National Park
Moyenne Island is a small island (24 acres) off the north coast of Seychelles with a rich history.
The island was abandoned save for a couple of fisherman throughout the early 1900s and bought by Brendon Grimshaw in 1962 for £8,000. Grimshaw first came to the Seychelles — an archipelago of 115 islands in the Indian Ocean, only eight of which are permanently inhabited — on holiday in 1962. At the time, Grimshaw was an editor working for the biggest newspapers in East Africa.
In 1961, Tanzania had declared independence and Kenya would follow a year later. Grimshaw had a good understanding of the political climate and the Englishman understood that jobs such as his would soon pass to the locals. With this context, Grimshaw searched for a new direction in life that would take him closer to nature.
On holiday in the Seychelles, Grimshaw began searching for private islands but quickly realised there weren’t many on the market or they were too expensive. However, on his penultimate day there, he was approach by a young man asking if he’d like to buy Moyenne Island, a 0.099sq km dot 4.5km off the north coast of the Seychelles’ largest island, Mahé.
“It was totally different. It was a special feeling,” he told a documentary film crew in 2009. “This is the place I’d been looking for.”
