The surrounding structures include the open-sided Ocean Kitchen with its front-row view of sun-stunned Cocos Island, the Island Café, a Chef’s Kitchen, a cool terracotta-tiled Wine Cellar, a boutique and first-floor library in the eaves of Pti Kaz (the “Small House”) and the sultry Lakanbiz bar, which is lined with travelling trunks and barrels of ageing Takamaka rum like a super-stylish pirate’s lair. The whitewashed walls, giant beanbags, rope swing chairs and comfortable, contemporary styling give the impression of effortless simplicity.
But creating Zil Pasyon has been anything but simple. I find this out the next morning talking to Steve Hill, the island ecologist, as he strides through the nursery and orchard in his sweat-stained Crocodile Dundee hat. For nine years Steve and a team of 15 men have been bushwhacking their way through a tangled mass of invasive coco plum, wrenching them out by the roots and clearing the way so that more delicate endemic species can re-establish themselves.
The rarest of them all is the Vateriopsis seychellarum (iron tree), of which there are only 41 mature individuals left on Earth. If any of Steve’s saplings survive it will be of inestimable environmental value. Behind him, stretching over three valleys, hundreds of juvenile bigarade, bilimbi, banana, avocado, custard apple, papaya and passion fruit trees stand amid millennia-old granite inselbergs, as if we’d arrived in Eden during the soft launch.
Source link : https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/africa/seychelles/articles/inside-six-senses-zil-pasyon-hotel-seychelles/
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Publish date : 2016-10-25 07:00:00
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