UAE Funds New Anse Royale Indoor Sports Complex as Herminie and Alneyadi Break Ground
📷 Photo: dronepicr via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.0
President Patrick Herminie and the United Arab Emirates chargé d’affaires to Seychelles, Ahmed Saeed Alneyadi, together with Sports Minister Kalsey Belle, unveiled a commemorative plaque and broke ground on Thursday for a UAE-financed indoor sports complex at Anse Royale, on the southern coast of Mahé. The project is the first major bilateral infrastructure milestone of the new Herminie administration, and one of the more visible of a wider Abu Dhabi-backed development package that includes housing, health and renewable energy projects.
The complex sits on parcel C7575 at Anse Royale, according to the public tender dossier issued by the Seychelles government in mid-2025, and is being financed directly by the Government of the United Arab Emirates. The tender documents specify a 52-week performance period for construction, putting the handover window in the second half of 2026 once the contract was awarded late last year. The facility will be a multi-purpose indoor arena designed for community sport, school competitions and national team training, in a country where most competitive indoor sport is currently squeezed into converted warehouses or open-air courts that are unusable when it rains.
For the UAE, the project is the most concrete deliverable yet of a partnership that President Wavel Ramkalawan first set out in a State House announcement in early 2024, and that Herminie has since carried forward. The original list of approved priority projects included a Barbarons housing scheme of about 80 new units, the Unity Stadium tartan track refurbishment, the Anse Royale arena, an MRI machine and financial support for two specialist medical personnel. Existing UAE-funded projects that remain live include the La Digue Hospital, a renewable energy plant, a drugs rehabilitation centre and the IECD building.
Herminie travelled to Dubai in May to consolidate the portfolio, and in a State House statement said at the time that the UAE had reconfirmed its continued commitment to several flagship projects despite regional pressures, listing four desalination plants to strengthen water security, the Anse Royale complex, and the Grand Anse Mahé housing project as priorities. The Dubai visit also produced a commitment from Emirates to restore daily air services to pre-Gulf-war frequencies, with the airline accounting for about 32% of visitor arrivals to Seychelles in 2025 and around 22% in early 2026.
The Anse Royale complex has been on the drawing board for several years. Mahé, the main island, has a chronic shortage of indoor training space, a problem that became acute after the 2024 arson attack on the Roche Caiman National Sports Complex, the country’s largest indoor venue, which the State House said at the time would require a full rebuild. National basketball, volleyball, badminton, futsal and gymnastics programmes have all been forced to share limited facilities since then. Sports federations have lobbied for the Anse Royale project to be fast-tracked as a partial replacement.
The Seychelles Sports Coordination Council, the umbrella body for national federations, held its first meeting of 2026 earlier this year with the Anse Royale complex as a standing item. Council chairman Cyril Payette has previously argued that the south of Mahé, where Anse Royale sits, has been underserved compared with the northern districts, both in terms of facilities and access to coaching. The new complex is intended to correct that imbalance, with a particular focus on school-level sport and on athletes preparing for the next Indian Ocean Island Games.
The Anse Royale community has lobbied for a venue of this kind for more than a decade, and Thursday’s ceremony, which included speeches by Herminie, Belle and Alneyadi, was treated as a public event rather than a closed diplomatic function, with schoolchildren and youth athletes in attendance. The names of the contractors and the final capacity of the arena are expected to be published once the tender evaluation is complete, although senior officials at the ceremony suggested the venue will seat several thousand spectators for indoor court sports and be capable of hosting regional competitions.
Beyond sport, the complex is being read locally as a marker of how the Seychelles–UAE relationship is being reorganised under the Herminie government. Where the previous administration had tended to announce UAE projects in bulk and then leave their progress to a slow procurement process, the current administration is pairing the announcements with publicly visible construction milestones, the Anse Royale foundation stone being the first. Officials briefed in Victoria said further groundbreaking ceremonies, on the Grand Anse housing project and on at least one of the four desalination plants, are planned before the end of the year.
Source: SN
