Alphonse Fishing Company and Blue Safari Seychelles operate from the atoll, offering packages to sustainably fly-fish and dive the Astove Wall.

[1] Much of the region in which Astove lies was explored by Arab seamen and merchants between 1000 and 1500 AD, but there is no record of human settlement on the island before 1760.

[3][4] The remaining slaves on Astove were eventually picked up and evacuated to Mahe, leaving one sole survivor named “Paul” on the island.

[2] On the morning of August 12, 1836, the ship Tiger of Liverpool, which was commanded by Captain Edward Searight, was wrecked on the reef of Astove atoll.

Astove was heavily mined for guano and phosphates, and hunted for its sea turtles, but for the most part remained not visited due to its remoteness and distance from normal shipping lanes.

“Part of the British-governed Seychelles, Astove was a ‘lost’ island.” The Veevers-Carters built a 14-room house, a processing center, a chapel, a store and small residences for their Seychelleois employees.

While copra constituted the primary cash crop, the Veevers-Carters plantation also grew tobacco and raised, for subsistence, goats, cattle and pigs.

It is a raised coral island of most peculiar form: a single stretch of land, that is 1.4 kilometres (0.9 miles) at the widest part, almost entirely encloses a shallow lagoon.

The lagoon has a maximum depth of 3 metres (9.8 feet), and the only exit is a winding passage in the south, called Gueule Bras Channel.

A small community is involved in small-scale farming and fishing for island consumption, as well as managing the newly opened lodge.

Large stretches of the reef rock were stripped bare of vegetation, but some Pisonia grandis and white milkwood (Sideroxylon inerme) persisted.

The general vegetation on much of the island's western side is herbaceous plants however, mainly the leadwort Plumbago aphylla, as well as Stachytarpheta species and the crowfoot grass Dactyloctenium pilosum.

Coconut palms (Cocos nucifera) remaining from the struggling plantation along the western shore, sisal (Agave sisalana), and wild cotton (Gossypium) are also found here and there.

[10] The eastern dunes are overgrown with the dropseed grass Sporobolus virginicus near the sea, and on the higher parts bwa matlo (bay cedar, Suriana maritima) shrubs are found.

In more sheltered places, a regular scrubland of vouloutye (Scaevola taccada) and tree heliotrope (Heliotropium foertherianum), with some Pisonia, occurs.

Unlike the other two atolls of the group, (Aldabra and Cosmoledo), there are no predator-free islets except for a few small sandbanks close to the lagoon entrance.