Comoros

Eastern Africa

A volcanic archipelago in the northern Mozambique Channel, between Madagascar and the East African coast, long known as the Perfume Islands for the ylang-ylang grown on its slopes. Grande Comore is crowned by Mount Karthala, one of the world's largest active volcanic calderas, while little Moheli holds the country's marine national park, a nursery for green turtles, humpback whales and dugongs in some of the Indian Ocean's richest reefs.

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What you can do in Comoros

Scuba Diving

MoheliMay Jun Jul Aug Sep Oct NovMoheli is the wild heart of the Comoros and one of the Indian Ocean's best-kept diving secrets. The waters around it form the Moheli Marine Park, the country's first protected area, set in the northern Mozambique Channel, a stretch recognised as one of the richest zones of marine biodiversity anywhere. Diving off the islets at Nioumachoua, you drop onto dense hard and soft coral among green and hawksbill turtles, which nest on the park's beaches in nationally important numbers, alongside reef fish in clouds, moray eels, rays and pods of dolphins. From July to October humpback whales move through to calve, and snorkellers and divers sometimes hear and see them; dugongs and, in the deep offshore water, the living-fossil coelacanth, share the same sea. There is almost no development and few other divers, so this is remote, low-impact diving with an eco-lodge for a base, closer to how reefs looked a generation ago.

Trekking / Hiking

Mount KarthalaMay Jun Jul Aug Sep OctMount Karthala is the roof of the Comoros and one of the great volcano treks of the Indian Ocean, a 2,361-metre shield volcano whose summit holds a caldera around four kilometres wide, among the largest active craters on earth. The climb from the villages above Moroni on Grande Comore is a serious one to two day trek that passes through banana groves and dense tropical rainforest loud with endemic birds, up through tree-fern and giant-heath cloud forest, and finally onto a bare, black moonscape of ash and lava where the vegetation gives out. Camping on the crater rim, you look down into a smoking caldera that last erupted seriously in 2005 to 2007, and at dawn the view runs across the whole island to the sea. The forest holds birds found nowhere else, the Karthala scops owl and the Comoro drongo among them. It is raw, little-visited and physically demanding, a proper expedition on an island most travellers never reach.

Best months at a glance

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Scuba Diving
Trekking