Baa Atoll

Baa Atoll is the modern administrative name for a group that older charts call South Maalhosmadulu, and its islands have been settled for centuries as fishing and craft communities under the Maldivian sultanate. Eydhafushi grew into the atoll's capital as the seat of its administration, and Thulhaadhoo built a national reputation for lacquer work — wooden bowls, boxes and vases turned on a lathe and finished in layers of coloured resin, a craft that once supplied the country's noble families and is still practised there.

The southern islands of the atoll, Goidhoo, Fehendhoo and Fulhadhoo, carry a separate thread of history. They sit on their own reef away from the rest of the atoll, remote enough that reaching them has always meant a long crossing. The atoll also appears in European accounts of Indian Ocean shipwrecks: the French navigator Francois Pyrard was wrecked on it in 1602 and spent years in the Maldives, leaving the first detailed European description of the islands.

Tourism came late here compared with the atolls around the capital. Resorts opened from the 1970s onwards further south, and Baa's first ones followed decades later; the domestic airport on Dharavandhoo opened in October 2012, and the change in the law allowing guesthouses on inhabited islands brought small-scale tourism to the villages soon after. The event that shaped the atoll's identity was UNESCO's designation of the whole atoll as a biosphere reserve in June 2011, with Hanifaru Bay as a strictly protected core area — a decision that turned the manta gatherings into both the atoll's best-known attraction and something managed, permitted and patrolled.

Life on the inhabited islands follows the pattern of the Maldivian atolls: Sunni Muslim, family-centred and organised around the mosque, the harbour, the school and the football pitch. The five daily prayers punctuate the working day, Friday midday is quiet, and the community is small enough that visitors are noticed and greeted. Dhivehi is spoken everywhere and English is common in guesthouses and dive centres.

Craft is the atoll's cultural marker. Thulhaadhoo's lacquer work, known as liyelaa jehun, is among the best-known traditional arts in the country, and pieces from the island are sold across the Maldives. Boatbuilding, mat weaving from reeds and coir rope work belong to the same tradition of making things from what the islands supply. Bodu beru, the big-drum music and dance, is performed at weddings and national holidays as it is throughout the country.

The atoll's other defining custom is newer and environmental. Since the biosphere designation, rules about the reefs are part of local life: fishing restrictions in core areas, limits on boats and swimmers at Hanifaru Bay, rangers on the water, and a widely shared understanding that the manta rays are an asset to be protected. Visitors are expected to follow briefings exactly — no touching and no chasing — and guesthouses and resorts alike take that seriously.

Roughly twelve thousand people live in the atoll, spread over its thirteen inhabited islands, with the largest community at Eydhafushi and the rest numbering a few hundred each. The uninhabited islands include those given over to resorts and a great many that hold nothing but sand, scrub and coconut palms. Distances are measured in boat time rather than kilometres, and the southern islands can feel remote from the rest of the atoll.

Fishing remains central — pole-and-line tuna, reef fish for the household — and tourism now provides much of the wage work, in the resorts, on the boats and in the guesthouses. Lacquer work and other crafts bring income to Thulhaadhoo. Government jobs in administration, health and schools are concentrated on Eydhafushi. A migrant workforce, largely Bangladeshi, does much of the construction and resort service work here as elsewhere in the country.

The rhythm of a village day begins before dawn with prayer and the boats, slows through the heat of the middle hours, and picks up in the late afternoon when children play on the beach and the tea houses fill. Supplies come by cargo boat from the capital, fresh water from desalination and rain tanks, and mobile coverage is good. The issues raised most often are coastal erosion, waste disposal, the cost of everything imported, and the state of the reefs after the coral bleaching that has affected the country's shallow reefs.

Food in Baa Atoll is Maldivian home cooking on the village islands and hotel cooking on the resort islands, with little in between. The village staple is tuna, caught locally, eaten fresh, smoked or boiled down: garudhiya, the clear tuna broth taken over rice with lime, chilli and raw onion, is the plainest everyday meal, and mas huni — smoked tuna shredded with grated coconut, onion and chilli, eaten with the flatbread roshi — is the standard breakfast.

Rihaakuru, the dark tuna paste that is the residue of long boiling, is eaten with rice and chilli and used to flavour curries. Tea houses serve hedhika, the small fried short eats — bajiya pastries, gulha dumplings filled with smoked tuna and coconut, masroshi and fish rolls — with very sweet milk tea in the morning and again in the late afternoon. Coconut is in nearly everything, grated, pressed for milk, or drunk young from the shell, and breadfruit and screwpine grow on the islands.

Guesthouses cook a mixture of Maldivian, South Asian and simple international food for their guests, often serving a fish caught that morning. The resorts run buffets and à la carte restaurants with almost entirely imported ingredients, and they are the only places in the atoll where alcohol is available: it is neither sold nor permitted on the inhabited islands, where fresh juice, milk tea and coffee take its place.