Black River

Black River is the leeward side of Mauritius, which is the whole reason to choose it. The mountains take the south-east trade winds off the water, so the lagoon here is calmer and drier than the east coast through most of the year.

Le Morne sits at the southern end, under a basalt mountain that UNESCO inscribed in 2008 — not for its geology but because runaway slaves sheltered on it through the eighteenth century and the early nineteenth, in caves and on the summit, protected by cliffs too steep to follow them up. The beach beneath it is public.

Flic-en-Flac, further north, is the other kind of place entirely: the longest developed beach on the west coast, and by the survey behind these pages the best-provided beach in this directory outside Hawaii.

SourcesOpenStreetMap·UNESCO — Le Morne Cultural Landscape