Kep: The Sea That Came Back — Chronicle of a Sanctuary Reborn

Ten years ago, the Kep archipelago was an exhausted sea: seagrass meadows ploughed under, dugongs gone, dolphins reduced to rumour. Today that same sea carries an international label, a quarter of a vast national restoration plan is already deployed, and fishermen are watching species they thought lost for good come back. A look back at two decades of stubborn work that turned this forgotten corner of the gulf into one of Southeast Asia's finest marine conservation success stories.

A seahorse clinging to a blade of seagrass: six species of this discreet rider live in the waters of the Kep archipelago

A Sea on Its Knees

Just a decade ago, the waters lapping the thirteen islands of the Kep archipelago — Koh Seh, Koh Angkrong, Koh Mak Prang, Koh Pou and their neighbours, at the southern tip of Cambodia — were the stage for a quiet disaster. Bottom trawlers methodically scraped the seagrass meadows, tore through coral reefs, and hauled in the last specimens of the marine megafauna. Electric fishing, dynamite: nothing was spared.

Local fishermen came home empty-handed. Dugongs had vanished. Dolphins, listed as "Endangered" on the IUCN Red List, had become little more than rare ghosts glimpsed in the distance. And beneath the surface, in the seagrass meadows that shelter the country's largest concentration of seahorses, six of the ocean's most discreet species were quietly dying out — caught as bycatch or sold dried to Vietnamese middlemen.

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