The Maldives is the lowest-lying country on Earth, its highest natural point rising barely 2.4 metres above sea level, spread across roughly 1,200 coral islands grouped into 26 atolls in the Indian Ocean. That extreme flatness makes the nation one of the most immediately vulnerable places on the planet to rising sea levels, a fact the Maldivian government has addressed with unusual, sometimes theatrical urgency, holding an underwater cabinet meeting in 2009 specifically to draw global attention to the threat.
The islands themselves are living structures in a sense, built from coral reefs that continue growing today, and much of the country’s tourism infrastructure, including its famous overwater bungalows, was deliberately designed to sit lightly on that fragile coral foundation rather than disturb it.
An Engineered Response to Rising Water
Hulhumale, an artificial island built by pumping sand from the seafloor, was constructed specifically to provide elevated, flood-resistant land for the growing population around the capital, Male, now one of the most densely populated islands on Earth. The country has also explored more radical solutions, including floating city concepts designed to rise and fall with sea levels rather than resist them, a genuinely novel approach to a genuinely existential problem.
Despite those pressures, the Maldives’ reef systems remain among the most biodiverse in the Indian Ocean, home to manta rays, whale sharks, and an extraordinary range of coral species that draw divers from around the world.
Painting Water That Changes Colour by the Metre
The layered turquoise and deep blue of Maldivian lagoons give a watercolourist an extraordinary range of water tones to work with. We’ve captured that shifting colour in our own Maldives Watercolor Print, painted first by hand and printed to order on archival paper, a small piece of the Indian Ocean for a wall at home.
Built from coral and racing against rising water, the Maldives remains one of the rare nations whose very existence depends on the same sea that makes it so extraordinary to look at.