VICTORIA, Seychelles, Seychelles is moving into the closing phase of a long campaign to place the Mission Ruins of Venn’s Town on the UNESCO World Heritage List, with on-site evaluation by international experts expected later this year and a final decision due in 2027.
📷 Photo: Patrick Joubert via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 4.0
The site sits on the lush hills of Sans Soucis in the southwest of Mahé, inside the Morne Seychellois National Park, at an altitude of around 450 metres. It is the remains of a late nineteenth-century Anglican settlement opened in 1876 to receive freed people from the Indian Ocean slave trade and closed in 1889.
The nomination has already cleared several formal hurdles since Seychelles placed the ruins on its tentative list in 2013 under cultural criteria (iv) and (vi). A UNESCO Preparatory Assistance grant was approved in May 2024, an advisory mission by World Heritage nomination consultant Barry Gamble followed later that year, and the Seychelles delegation attended the 47th session of the World Heritage Committee in Paris in July 2025 to engage committee members ahead of the formal review.
National coordinator Dr Odile de Comarmond is overseeing the historical research, with Ian Charlette coordinating environmental components and the GIS Section of the Ministry of Lands and Housing providing mapping support. A national capacity-building workshop, run with the African World Heritage Fund, took place in August 2025, followed by stakeholder consultations and a December 2025 archival research mission to the National Archives of Mauritius.
If inscribed, Venn’s Town would join a global network of properties recognised under the UNESCO World Heritage Convention, a designation that carries obligations as well as prestige. For Seychelles, the practical effects would include stronger legal protection for the ruins and the surrounding Morne Seychellois landscape, new heritage-education programmes for schools, and access to international conservation funding.
Cultural tourism is the most visible economic upside. Heritage-focused travellers typically spend longer in destination countries and spend more per day than beach-only visitors, a pattern that Seychelles’ tourism planners have openly courted since the end of the pandemic.
The site’s history is unusually direct. After the Royal Navy rescued 2,816 enslaved people from Arab dhows in the Indian Ocean between 1861 and 1874 and brought them to Mahé, the first group of 252 arrived on HMS Lyra in 1861. The freed people and their children were initially placed on coconut and vanilla estates, then moved to Venn’s Town once it opened. Three superintendents ran the site during its brief life, William Bartlett Chancellor from 1876 to 1880, Henry Morris Warry from 1880 to 1885, and Edwin Lucock from 1885 until its closure in 1889.
The English botanical artist Marianne North visited the settlement in 1882 and spent three weeks painting the surroundings. Four of those works remain in her collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew.
Seychelles has named 2027 as the year the World Heritage Committee will deliberate on whether to inscribe Venn’s Town. The committee’s decision, expected at its 2027 session, will close a nomination process that began formally more than a decade ago.
Sources cited: Mission Ruins of Venn’s Town, Wikipedia. UNESCO World Heritage Centre. African World Heritage Fund. List of World Heritage Sites by year of inscription, Wikipedia.
Source: SN
