In 1962, a former newspaper editor bought a barren Seychelles island for $11,000; over the next 46 years, he planted 16,000 trees by hand and turned it into the world's smallest national park

Most people who dream of buying their own island probably never get around to it. But Brendon Grimshaw did. In 1962, a British newspaper editor bought a nearly deserted scrap of land in the Seychelles called Moyenne Island for £8,000, a price often translated today to around $10,000 to $11,000, according to a report by All That's Interesting.

There was no electricity on the island and no running water, and according to the same report, there were only four trees left standing on it. Grimshaw spent the next 46 years transforming the barren plot into what is today widely recognized as the world's smallest national park.

A midnight decision that changed everything
Grimshaw was not chasing a vanity project. According to BBC Travel, he had worked his way up to editing newspapers in East Africa before visiting Seychelles on holiday in 1962, in search of a new chapter in life. On what he thought would be his last day in the country, a stranger on the street asked whether he wanted to buy an island.


That day, Grimshaw toured Moyenne for the first time and by that night had agreed to buy it. The island had been deserted since 1915. Weeds and rats had taken over, and, according to BBC Travel, the undergrowth was so thick that fallen coconuts apparently never even hit the ground.

From four trees to sixteen thousand
Grimshaw didn't do this alone. He joined forces with a local Seychellois man called René Antoine Lafortune, and they spent decades clearing brush, cutting paths and planting trees by hand, one at a time, with no machinery. That effort, according to a 2012 obituary published by Breaking Travel News, amounted to 16,000 trees, including 700 mahogany trees that grew to 60 to 70 feet tall, as well as roughly 4.8 kilometers (about 3 miles) of walking trails across the island's 24 acres. It is worth stopping to consider the scale of it. Moyenne is smaller than most American city parks, but these two men treated it like a decades-long restoration project, not a backyard hobby.

Bringing the giant tortoises home
Trees were only part of the plan. Grimshaw and Lafortune also reintroduced Aldabra giant tortoises, a species that had been hunted to extinction on many islands of the Seychelles. According to the same Breaking Travel News report, during Grimshaw’s life, the tortoise population on Moyenne passed 100. Today, the BBC Travel says that the number is now close to 50, along with a host of bird species that returned when the habitat recovered.

Reintroducing tortoises like this isn't just a feel-good detail. A 2026 published in the peer-reviewed journal Restoration Ecology found that Aldabra giant tortoises reintroduced to other Seychelles islands helped restore natural plant relationships by acting as grazers and seed dispersers, supporting broader ecosystem recovery on those islands. What Grimshaw initiated decades ago with his tortoise program on Moyenne is consistent with current conservation practice.

Turning private land into public land
Grimshaw could have sold Moyenne many times over. The Breaking Travel News obituary notes that he once turned down an offer of $50 million, saying he didn’t want the island to become a private playground for millionaires. Instead, he spent years negotiating with the Seychelles government to protect it permanently, and in June 2008, Moyenne was formally declared a national park in its own right, separate from the surrounding Sainte Anne Marine National Park.

Grimshaw lived on the island until his death on July 3, 2012. He was 87 years old, but, as a BBC News profile filmed that April showed, he was still walking the island’s trails each day, checking on the trees and tortoises he had spent his life raising. His friend Suketu Patel now runs the Moyenne Island Foundation, which still manages the island in accordance with Grimshaw’s original vision.

Why does this tiny island still matter
At only 0.4 kilometers long, Moyenne is often called the smallest protected area of its kind in the world, which seems almost laughable compared to the vast national parks of America, such as Yellowstone or the Grand Canyon. But the size of it is what makes the story land. One man, working mostly with his hands and a modest amount of savings, spent nearly five decades converting a neglected piece of land into a working ecosystem that is now owned by the public.

It’s a tiny park with a big reminder: conservation does not always need billions of dollars or the support of governments to get off the ground. Sometimes it's one person, a machete, and a stubborn refusal to give up.