Located 13,000 kilometres from the French mainland, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, the Kerguelen archipelago is home to a maritime nature reserve that has been listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2019. On land, thousands of elephant seals spend their days basking in the sun. The seabed, which has remained untouched, is teeming with rare fish. Hundreds, perhaps even thousands of organisms, have yet to be logged. FRANCE 24 takes you to discover this unique ecosystem.

The Kerguelen Islands, also known as the Desolation Islands, are a group of islands in the Antarctic constituting one of the two exposed parts of the Kerguelen Plateau, a large igneous province mostly submerged by the southern Indian Ocean.