VELAA PRIVATE ISLAND:


OTHER EDEN


Neil Beckett takes a special trip to this exclusive Maldivian resort that is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year and finds a gastronomic paradise with an astonishing food and wine offer


and crabs, seaweed and white snapper—harder still to imagine creating a luxurious paradise for food and wine lovers, not only sun worshippers or water babies. Yet that is exactly what billionaire Czech entrepreneur and financier Jiří Šmejc and his wife Radka set out to do when they bought what is now Velaa Private Island ten years ago. And they have succeeded in fine style. No “demi-paradise” this—it’s complete. But it is mini, an almost-perfect circle of little more than 500 yards (500m) across. You can easily saunter all the way around its dazzling white-sand circumference in half an hour. The broad oval shape resembles a turtle—velaa, in Dhivehi, the language of the Maldives—and turtles, mock and real, are everywhere (except the soup).


F


All along the archipelago—some 540 miles (868km) long from north to south, with an area of more than 8,000 sq miles (21,000 sq km)—many of the Maldives’ 1,200 islands are beautiful, and more than a few are now home to luxurious hotels and resorts. (Among the many Dhivehi words for an island is huraa.) But none, surely, is more breathtakingly beautiful, exclusive, or luxurious than Velaa, on the Noonu Atoll 116 miles (187km) north of the capital Malé, whose impressive list of accolades grows longer year by year. (The latest haul can be found on its informative website velaaprivateisland. com and in its inspiring in-house magazine there, Velaa Moments.) Arriving on one of Velaa’s own seaplanes, flown the 45 minutes from


Malé by two barefoot pilots in shorts, we were warmly welcomed at the Arrival Pavillion by no fewer than six staff, including Wayne Milgate, the experienced and hospitable Australian general manager; Lisa Jakobsson, the dazzlingly efficient and spirited Swedish director of PR, marketing, and events; and Addo, our butler (a model of courteous charm and discreet efficiency, who appeared as if by magic only whenever needed or wanted). A maximum of some 150 guests are looked after by some 450 staff, including 26 gardeners. (All those exquisite orchids on trees don’t get there by themselves.) All of those we met were unfailingly friendly and helpful, evincing a genuine sense of warmth and welcome. And despite the small size of the island, it never seems small, still less crowded. The circular shape and the clever arrangement of the carefully manicured meandering “roads”


THE WORLD OF FINE WINE | ISSUE 79 | 2023 | 155


rom above, the many smaller islands of the Maldives look like giant smoke rings in a two-tone sea of teal and turquoise, their beauty matched only by their fragility and seeming simplicity. It is hard to imagine doing much more on them than eking out a Robinson Crusoe-like existence, subsisting on coconuts


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