Remote and off-limits to tourists, Chagos is a paradisiacal slice of the tropics that's home to one of the most pristine reef systems on Earth. So why are they controversial?
On our third day sailing south from Addu City in the Maldives, thunderhead clouds rose around our boat, reducing visibility to near zero. With full sails, we raced the weather through a reef-strewn pass, weaving between coral mounds until the sea flattened and lush, uninhabited islands slid past on either side. Once we settled on a mooring off the island of Boddam, I realised we had arrived somewhere few people would ever see: the Chagos Archipelago, one of the most remote island groups on Earth.
Chagos is made up of seven atolls and some 60 islands scattered across the Indian Ocean like a handful of shells flung across a vast blue sea. Salomon, its northernmost atoll, lies 286 nautical miles south of the Maldives. Little-known and isolated, it's a place that demands self-reliance and a tolerance for being profoundly far from anywhere else. Six years into a world circumnavigation, my family and I had sailed halfway around the planet to get here, bringing everything we would need with us – just as the few who venture here must.
Yet despite their apparent insignificance, these palm-studded islands have been thrust into an unlikely international row. In recent weeks, Chagos has become the focus of renewed diplomatic tension between the UK, the United States and Mauritius, reopening questions about sovereignty and the legacy of colonial rule.
Diane Selkirk
The UK has controlled Chagos (officially known as the British Indian Ocean Territory), since 1814. In 1965, the islands were separated from Mauritius when Mauritius was still a British colony and Chagos became formally established as a British overseas territory. The UK purchased the archipelago for £3m, but Mauritius has argued that it was illegally forced to give Chagos away as part of a deal to gain independence.
Beginning in 1967, the British government began forcibly removing Chagos' residents to build a highly secretive joint military base with the United States on Diego Garcia, the archipelago's largest island. Since gaining independence from the UK in 1968, Mauritius has claimed sovereignty over Chagos, maintaining that it's an integral part of its territory. Amid growing diplomatic pressure, the UK signed a controversial agreement to hand control of the archipelago to Mauritius in 2025 – a move that US President Donald Trump recently called "an act of great stupidity."
But while world leaders grapple over Chagos' future, evidence of its tangled past is everywhere in this mysterious, paradisiacal place.
Pristine and haunted
Chagos is among the most intact reef systems on the planet and has long held a near-mythical reputation among sailors. For decades, self-sufficient voyagers lingered for months, fishing the reef, harvesting coconuts and living slowly. That era ended in the late 1990s, when authorities tightened access. Today, these disputed tropical islands are closed to tourism and the only way for sailors, researchers and authorised visitors to explore the islands is to secure advanced permits, receive a medical evaluation, obtain wreck-removal insurance and then sail to reach this far-flung place, just as we did.
During our four-week stay (the maximum allowed), days fell into a rhythm shaped by the environment. We snorkelled reefs thick with life, spotting dozens of sharks, rays and turtles, and vast schools of wrasse, damselfish and parrotfish. We hiked shaded trails through old plantations, and caught jacks and snappers with ease, logging each one as required. Laundry water came from shallow wells, where rainwater floats above salt. Each day, the skies filled with red-footed boobies, noddies, sooty terns and tropicbirds nesting in astonishing numbers along the shoreline.
Diane Selkirk
Yet fragility was everywhere. The reefs showed patches of bleaching. Each evening, monstrous rats – introduced centuries earlier by European colonists and fat on seabird eggs – emerged from the jungle alongside enormous coconut crabs, pushing us off the beaches and back towards the boat.
On Boddam – once one of Chagos' three settled islands – we explored dense jungle threaded with old paths, stumbling across the remains of a church, jail and school built in the 1930s. In the graveyard, nearly every inscription had been erased by time. Someone had lived here long enough to build, bury their dead and imagine a future.
The islands felt both pristine and haunted.
Hoping to understand more, I reached out to Anne-Marie Gendron, a Chagossian in the Seychelles and one of roughly 2,000 people forcibly removed from the archipelago in the late 1960s and early 1970s. She had lived with her parents on Boddam when it was a bustling village of a few hundred residents, and was among the last to leave in 1973.
For many Chagossians, the stakes are deeply personal. Elders continue to die without ever seeing their homeland again. Some cautiously welcome the possibility of returning to the outer islands, including Boddam, possibly to develop small eco-tourism ventures and artisanal fisheries; others reject the deal outright, objecting to the continued ban on resettling in Diego Garcia and the absence of direct consultation.
Environmentalists, meanwhile, warn that any human return must be carefully managed. There are concerns that Mauritius may lack the resources to protect the marine reserve at its current scale. Rising seas add another layer of uncertainty: like the Maldives, Chagos is perilously low-lying, its future shaped as much by climate change as by diplomacy.
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If true tourism comes at all, it's likely to remain limited. A 2015 feasibility study envisioned small-scale, yacht-based access rather than land-based resorts or large infrastructure. For sailors, scientists and a handful of intrepid travellers, Chagos could one day become a model of tightly controlled access to one of the world's most spectacular reef systems – managed, perhaps, by the descendants of those once expelled from it.
"Chagos was paradise," Anne-Marie Gendron told me. "But it was also our home."