You arrive by seaplane, take your shoes off, and are gently told you will not need them again until you leave. Soneva Fushi means it. The sand paths, the un-fenced jungle, the bikes leaning against every villa, it all adds up to the rarest thing in luxury travel: somewhere genuinely relaxed.
What surprises you is how well the whole barefoot fantasy holds up with children in it. There is space here, real space, the kind that lets an eight year old vanish for an hour on a bike and come back grinning, and lets you not panic while she does.
Villas are enormous and mostly hidden in the trees, each with its own stretch of beach and, in many cases, a pool the children will treat as the main event. Family villas connect properly rather than pretending a sofa bed counts. The outdoor bathrooms are a hit with the kids and a mild adjustment for the grandparents.
The kids’ den is less a crèche and more a small kingdom, and by day two our five year old had stopped asking where we were going.
The Den is the best children’s club we have seen anywhere, a rambling wooden playhouse with a cinema, a chocolate room and a slide into a paddling pool. Crucially it is staffed by people who actually take the children out, to the reef, to the observatory, on the hunt for hermit crabs, rather than parking them in front of a screen.
It is not cheap, and it does not pretend to be. But of all the islands we tested, this is the one where the thing that delights the children and the thing that restores the adults turn out to be the same thing. If you are going to do the Maldives with a family once, do it here.
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