Decades before foreign hotel groups began bidding for prime beachfront property in Seychelles, Brendon Grimshaw bought an entire island. While on a visit in the early 1970s from Tanzania, then his home, the Englishman bought Moyenne Island from private sellers on a whim, paying £10,000.

Over three and a half decades, with the help of the son of the island’s former fisherman-guardian, he transformed a barren piece of bush into a nature sanctuary, planting 16,000 trees and attracting thousands of birds to the island.