Bazaruto Archipelago

Declared in 1971, the Bazaruto Archipelago — nicknamed "the Pearl of the Indian Ocean" — protects one of the last viable coastal populations of dugong along the African shore of the Indian Ocean, a grazing marine mammal whose regional numbers have been cut down across most of its former range by hunting and by the degradation of seagrass meadows. Its sand-dune islands, some over 100 metres high, were built up from sediment carried down over millennia from the delta of the Save River.