The first resort in this country opened in October 1972 on an uninhabited coconut island. Thirty rooms, built in blocks of three. Coral stone for the walls, coconut timber, palm thatch on the roofs. There was no jetty, so guests waded ashore.
The late Mohamed Umar Maniku, who built it with Champa Hussain Afeef and Kerafa Ahmed Naseem and went on to chair Universal Enterprises, described later how it was done.
"And please remember, everything we did we made by hand," he said, "the plastering, the floor cement, the coconut leaves for roofs, the welling for water, the basic electrical power, everything!"
People look back at that now and call it sustainable. I understand why. Almost nothing travelled, the buildings were made by people who lived here, and a room that fell apart was repaired rather than replaced. Set beside a shipped container of engineered panel, it looks like a lost virtue.
But Maniku said something else that gets quoted far less often. The guests, he said, wanted simplicity in natural surroundings, "and that was what we had to offer and all we could afford."
All we could afford. The man who built the first resort said it plainly, long before anyone started selling the idea back to us.
It wasn't a virtue. It was a constraint. And the honest version of this story is less comfortable than the nostalgic one.
What the island had was the reef
Coral was what the island had. Builders cut it from the reef and bonded it with uva, the lime they made by burning more of it. For centuries it was kept for the mosques and the gravestones, while houses were coconut leaf and whatever timber was to hand. The coral house became ordinary only in the early seventies, when the fishing fleet got engines and a stone house meant you had done well.
Tourism arrived in the same years. Significant quantities of coral went into building resort islands through the seventies and eighties, while Malé grew fast and took coral for its own construction.
The costs weren't hypothetical. Mining live coral reduced fish biomass, disturbed the baitfish the fishery depended on, and removed the reef structure that breaks the sea before it reaches the island. A country made of low islands was quarrying its own wave defence.
Regulation arrived slowly. Before 1992 there was very little, beyond protecting islands that belonged to individual owners. Rules came in that year barring mining on house reefs, atoll rim reefs and bait fishing reefs. The Environment Protection and Preservation Act followed in 1993, and by the late nineties coral had largely gone out of use in Malé and at the resorts. Later rules limited both the volume and where it could be taken from.
So the period people remember as our sustainable era was also the period we did the most damage to the thing the whole country sits behind.
Both of those are true. An article that only tells you the first half is selling you something.
Then the rules tightened, and the builders got cleverer
What follows came to me from people building resorts then, so take it as their account rather than a documented record.
Once coral was off the table and sand could only come from designated places, developers had a problem. They still had to build, on an island with no quarry and nothing to make blocks from.
What they used was sand they already had on site.
It was stockpiled in heaps and left alone, and the rain did the cleaning. Once the salt had washed out, they mixed it with cement, made blocks, and built the resort out of them.
I think that's genuinely impressive, for a reason that isn't obvious.
Nobody was pouring reinforced concrete in those days. The walls went up in block, and the plaster was cement mixed with sand off the beach.
Salt in that sand causes a specific, very visible problem. As the wall dries, the salt travels to the surface with the moisture and crystallises there, lifting the paint off from underneath. You repaint it, and it comes off again, because the salt's still in the wall and it hasn't finished coming out.
So washing the sand wasn't a refinement. It was the difference between a wall you could finish and one that would never hold paint.
Nobody handed those builders a specification. They solved it with a pile of sand, the rain, and enough patience to wait.
The constraint lifted
Freight got cheaper and more frequent, anything could arrive on any island, and the Maldives stopped being limited by what was here.
You can watch it happen in the import figures. Between 2017 and 2025, imports of wood and articles of wood fell from MVR 1,688 million to 1,305 million, down roughly a quarter, while imports of furniture and its parts rose from 1,265 million to 1,912 million, up by half. Official figures, running in opposite directions. We bring in less timber and more of the finished object.
Go back further through UN trade data and the crossover is older than I expected. Furniture imports passed wood around 2002 and never went back.
These are nominal values covering every use of wood in the country, not resort construction alone. Treat them as direction rather than measurement, and the direction isn't ambiguous.
What we gave up, and what we didn't replace
Losing the constraint was mostly good. We're not going back to quarrying reef to build a villa, and nobody should want to.
But the constraint was doing something besides limiting us. It was forcing knowledge. When you can only build with what's to hand, you learn quickly what the salt does to it, how it behaves in the monsoon, how long it lasts and how to fix it. That knowledge wasn't written down anywhere. It didn't need to be. It lived in the people doing the work, reinforced every time something failed.
The sand heaps are the clearest example. Nobody wrote that rule down. They worked it out from the paint coming off, and then everybody building knew it.
When the containers started arriving, the learning stopped being automatic. You can now specify a material nobody on the island has ever seen, from a catalogue produced in a country with no salt, no humidity and no monsoon. It'll be installed by people who have no basis for an opinion about it, and nobody's obliged to find out what happened to it in five years.
We replaced a constraint with a choice, and we never built the thing a choice requires, which is a record of what the last choice did.
So are we sustainable now?
We have the word now, and we use it properly. Many people in this industry work hard at it. Solar on the roofs, water bottled on the island, waste separated, marine biologists on the payroll and real reef programmes. I'm not going to pretend any of that's theatre.
But there's a question underneath it I can't answer from the outside, and I suspect most owners can't either.
Is it sustainability, or is it the part of sustainability a guest can see?
Materials are only where it starts. A villa stripped out every few years isn't sustainable whatever the panel is made of. Neither is a property that closes for months to be put right, or one whose failures nobody writes down, so the next island builds the same detail and finds out the same way.
That's a bigger question than where the timber came from, and it doesn't get answered by a certificate on the wall.
What the first builders had
They knew more about how a material behaves on a Maldivian island than most of us do, without a laboratory, a standard or a specification.
They also took it from the reef, because knowing how a material performs tells you nothing about whether you should be using it.
We have the opposite problem. We can get almost anything delivered to any island, we have a word for doing it responsibly, and we still have very little idea which of it survives here.
Neither position is a good one. The difference is that ours is fixable, and it would cost almost nothing to start.
Sources
Maldives Traveller
Kurumba Maldives
Statistical Yearbook of Maldives 2026, Maldives Bureau of Statistics
UN Comtrade
Marine Research Section, Ministry of Fisheries and Agriculture, via FAO
Environment Protection and Preservation Act, Law No. 4/93
What the Maldives looked like before mass tourism, CNN Travel
President underscores contributions of late Mohamed Umar Manik, President's Office of the Maldives