Four Seasons Resort Maldives at Landaa Giraavaru

The seaplane banks over Baa Atoll and the island below is long, green and ringed with a lagoon the colour of bottle glass, with a line of villas on stilts curving off its tip. That is Landaa Giraavaru. Four Seasons Resort Maldives at Landaa Giraavaru, in Baa Atoll, opened in 2006 as the second Four Seasons in the Maldives and the one that put science at the centre of the resort rather than at the margin.

History

Four Seasons had run Kuda Huraa, a small island resort near Malé, since 1998. Landaa Giraavaru was the bigger, remoter sister, built on an island of about 44 acres in Baa Atoll, which in 2011 became the Maldives' first UNESCO biosphere reserve. The resort opened in late 2006 after a construction period lengthened by the 2004 tsunami. Its Marine Discovery Centre opened with it, and the manta ray research programme that began there in 2005 grew into the Manta Trust, the charity founded by the biologist Guy Stevens that now coordinates manta research across the world.

Architecture and design

The island is large enough that the villas are spread out along the beach and over the lagoon with real distance between them. Beach villas are walled compounds of coral stone and thatch with a private pool, an outdoor bath and a garden running to the sand; the over-water villas stand on a jetty off the northern tip with a net hammock over the lagoon and a pool on the deck. The public buildings are low pavilions under thatch, and the arrival jetty, the spa and the restaurants are each on their own stretch of shore. Bicycles are the way around.

Rooms and suites

There are 103 villas and bungalows, not the 130 on file: beach villas with pools, water villas with pools, family villas with two bedrooms, and the Landaa Estate, a three-bedroom compound with a 100-metre beach of its own. Each water villa has a glass panel in the floor and steps into the lagoon.

Dining

Blu is the Italian restaurant on the beach, with a wood-fired oven and the lagoon at the tables. Al Barakat is Middle Eastern, on a deck over the water with mezze and grills under lanterns. Fuego Grill cooks fish and meat over charcoal on the beach. Seabar is the sunset bar at the end of a pontoon, and Café Landaa, by the main pool, serves through the day. A Maldivian night market runs once a week on the beach.

Wellness

The Island Spa is on its own, reached by boat or across the lagoon, with treatment pavilions over the water; the Ayurvedic Retreat, run with Indian doctors, is the only one of its kind in the Maldives and offers programmes of a week or more. There are also a yoga pavilion, a Night Spa with treatments after dark, and the Marine Discovery Centre, where guests join the biologists on the house reef, plant coral frames with the Reefscapers programme or go out to Hanifaru Bay between May and November, when hundreds of manta rays feed in the bay.

Weddings and events

The resort stages beach weddings and blessings on the sand and on the water villa jetties, and the Landaa Estate takes families and small groups. There are no conference rooms; this is not a meetings resort. Capacities are not given here.

Location

Baa Atoll lies about 120 kilometres north-west of Malé. The seaplane from Velana International Airport takes about 35 minutes and is the only way in, operating in daylight; the Four Seasons Explorer, the resort's own catamaran, cruises between Landaa Giraavaru and Kuda Huraa. It is the resort on the Maldives for anyone who wants to spend the week underwater with the people who study it.