Indonesia

10 records spread across an archipelago of seventeen thousand islands, 2 of them on this coast, and the register's clearest examples of properties built under constraint rather than to a standard.

Bawah Reserve was built across six islands by hand, without heavy machinery, because the lagoon could not take it. Cempedak is built of bamboo. Misool leased a reef from surrounding communities and stopped the fishing on it before it sold a room, and now runs one of the most effective no-take zones in the Coral Triangle. These are not styling choices; they are what the place allowed, and the register records them as constraints.

Raja Ampat is the reason many people come and deserves the plain statement: it holds more recorded reef fish species than any comparable area on earth, and the diving is the point rather than the setting.

Access is the cost. Most of these require two domestic flights and a boat, schedules change, and the properties that run their own transfers say so because the alternative is a lost day.

This country is filed under more than one water region. 2 records of its 10 are here; the rest are in South China Sea (8).