If you flew over Seychelles in an aeroplane, you would see green dots of land floating in a huge blue sea. Most of the islands are tiny - some no bigger than a football pitch. Only a handful of them have roads, shops or schools. The three biggest are called Mah茅, Praslin and La Digue, and almost everyone in the country lives on these three.
The islands come in two kinds. The 'inner islands' are made of granite - the same hard, sparkly rock you find in old mountains - and have big rounded boulders on their beaches. The 'outer islands' are made of coral, and are mostly low, flat and ringed with sand. The granite ones are unusual, because most ocean islands in the world are made of coral or volcanoes, not granite.
Even though Seychelles is small, the area of sea it looks after is huge. The country has about 123,000 people, but the patch of ocean around its islands is roughly the size of France. Out in that ocean, there are coral reefs, schools of tuna, dolphins, whale sharks and turtles - all part of the Seychellois 'sea garden'.
Living on an island shapes how children grow up. Many Seychellois children learn to swim before they can ride a bike. Boats are as ordinary as buses. A trip to see a cousin on another island might mean a ferry ride across open sea instead of a car journey.