Le Morne Beach

Le Morne is on the south-western peninsula of Mauritius, beneath Le Morne Brabant, a basalt monolith rising five hundred and fifty metres straight out of the sea. The beach runs along the lagoon at its foot.

The mountain is a UNESCO World Heritage site, and for a reason that has nothing to do with scenery. Le Morne was a refuge for maroons — escaped slaves — who lived in its caves and on its summit through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Oral tradition holds that a group of them, seeing troops approaching in 1835, jumped from the cliff rather than be recaptured, not knowing that the party had come to tell them slavery had been abolished. The mountain is a monument to slave resistance, and the inscription is on that basis.

The lagoon is why the beach works. Reef encloses a wide shallow flat with steady water, and the trade wind funnels around the peninsula reliably enough that Le Morne has become the principal kitesurfing and windsurfing site in the Indian Ocean. One Eye, a wave breaking over the reef off the point, is a well-known and serious spot. Inside the lagoon the water is calm and shallow and the swimming is easy.

Development is a handful of large resorts along the peninsula with public access points between them; Mauritian law makes all beaches public and public beaches here are genuinely used by Mauritian families at weekends. La Gaulette and the public beach at Le Morne itself are where Mauritians go, and Île aux Bénitiers offshore is the standard boat trip — a sandbar island in the same lagoon with dolphins in the channel outside it.

The mountain is a World Heritage site because escaped slaves sheltered on it, not because it photographs well. Read that before pointing a camera at it. Below, the lagoon is flat and the trade wind is reliable enough to have made this the kitesurfing capital of the Indian Ocean.