Six Senses Zil Pasyon

The British exiled the Sultan of Perak to Félicité in the late nineteenth century, accused of murder, and the island has gone some way up in the world since. Until the 1970s it was a coconut plantation worked by about fifty people. Since 2016 it has held Six Senses Zil Pasyon, Creole for island of passion, on less than a third of its 652 acres; the rest is left to forest and granite. The granite is the point. Richard Hywel Evans set thirty timber villas among boulders bigger than they are, grey and streaked with black, and gave each its own pool. On the cliff, one house is clad in dark stone and grassed over on top, its pool hung out over bare rock. Inside, the timber carries on into a library under a steep roof lined with woven matting, and at a stone kitchen counter four director's chairs face crates of oranges.

Recommended for couples who want an island mostly to themselves, and for families with children of four to twelve, the ages the kids club takes. The spa has gone furthest into the granite: five treatment pavilions among the boulders, one of them in a cave. The resort's boats take five to ten minutes to the two Sisters, Grande Soeur and Petite Soeur, for diving and snorkelling, and twenty to La Digue. Praslin is a little further, and in its Vallée de Mai the coco de mer, the world's largest seed, grows wild. Back on Félicité, dinner can follow the spa into the rock: the Wine Vault is built into the granite.