Qualla: João Vieira and Poilão Marine National Park

João Vieira and Poilão Marine National Park: Introduction

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On a single curve of beach barely two kilometres long, an event unfolds each year that is repeated almost nowhere else on Earth at this scale. Green sea turtles, some weighing as much as a person, drag themselves out of the Atlantic at night, dig their nests in the sand, and return to the dark water before dawn. Tens of thousands of them come to Poilão, an uninhabited island of just forty-three hectares in the southeastern Bijagós Archipelago. This is the heart of the João Vieira and Poilão Marine National Park, and it is the most important green turtle nesting colony on the entire Atlantic coast of Africa.

João Vieira and Poilão Marine National Park: The Sacred Island

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Poilão's protection did not begin with biologists. Long before the park existed, the Bijagó people held the island sacred, restricting who could land and what could be taken. That reverence, more than any law, is why the turtles still come. The marine park, declared in August 200...

João Vieira and Poilão Marine National Park: A Beach Full of Turtles

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The numbers at Poilão are staggering. Sandy beaches make up just over half of the island's four-kilometre coastline, yet they host one of the densest green turtle rookeries in the world. In recent years the island has averaged tens of thousands of nests each season, with exceptio...

João Vieira and Poilão Marine National Park: Counting and Guarding

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The work of understanding Poilão began in 1994, when researchers first started tagging turtles to learn where they went. By the late 1990s, alongside the science, came a darker discovery: itinerant poachers were taking turtles from the islands, and the push to formalise protectio...

João Vieira and Poilão Marine National Park: Life Beneath the Surface

Sun, 14 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The turtles are the headline, but the park's waters teem with more. Humpback and bottlenose dolphins move through the channels between the islands. Jacks of the genus Caranx and snappers of the genus Lutjanus shoal over the shallows, hunted in turn by sharks. The richness is no a...