Indian Ocean

78 records, more than a third of the register, and fifty-three of them Maldivian. That imbalance is the truth about the market rather than a defect of the atlas: the Maldives is the only country in the world where the one-island-one-resort formula is the national planning rule, and a register built on that formula was always going to fill up here first.

The consequence is that the Maldives is where the distinctions get fine. An atoll with a single resort in it, as at Laamu and Thaa, is a different order of quiet from a central-atoll island with neighbours visible across the water, and the register separates the two rather than calling both remote. The Seychelles answer a different question — granite, forest, rewilding, and islands that had ecosystems before they had hotels — and East Africa answers a third, where the reef is the reason and the lodge is the means.

It is also the ocean where conservation claims are easiest to make and hardest to verify. The register marks the properties that created a reserve, the ones with researchers living on the island, and the ones where the programme is a leaflet, and it does not use the same word for all three.