Mauritius
A multicultural island where the dodo once walked
Mauritius is a volcanic island in the southwestern Indian Ocean, famous for turquoise lagoons, sugar plantations, and as the only home the dodo ever knew before it vanished. Some 2,000 kilometers off the African mainland, it has built one of Africa's most prosperous and stable economies on a foundation of tourism, textiles, finance, and sugar. Its population is a remarkable mosaic, Indian, African, Chinese, and European, that arrived through colonial trade and indentured labor and now coexists in a peaceful, polyglot society that punches far above its size.
The island is the eroded remnant of ancient volcanoes, ringed almost entirely by one of the world's largest unbroken coral reefs that encloses calm lagoons. A central plateau rises to jagged peaks, the highest being Piton de la Petite Rivière Noire at 828 meters, their dramatic basalt forms a signature of the landscape. Mauritius also administers outer islands including Rodrigues and lays claim to the disputed Chagos Archipelago. The climate is tropical and maritime, moderated by southeast trade winds, with a warm rainy summer and a cooler, drier winter, and the island lies in the path of occasional cyclones.
Uninhabited until Dutch sailors landed in the seventeenth century and hunted the flightless dodo to extinction, the island passed to France and then Britain, each leaving a deep imprint on language, law, and cuisine. Sugar plantations brought enslaved Africans and, after abolition, hundreds of thousands of indentured workers from India, whose descendants form the majority today. Independence came in 1968, and the country became a republic in 1992. English is the official language of government while French and the French-based Mauritian Creole dominate daily life, and Hindu, Christian, and Muslim traditions blend in a celebrated festival calendar.