Mafate

Interesting facts

Mail is still delivered on foot; one postman, Yvrin Pausé, walked about 252,000 km over his career, more than six times around the Earth.

A slave hunter, François Mussard, reported killing a maroon called Maffack at the foot of the Bronchard peak in September 1751.

A spa was established at the hot spring from 1853 under Governor Hubert-Delisle, and the hamlet that grew around it gave its name to the whole cirque.

Before the name Mafate spread in the late 19th century, the basin was known as the cirque of the Rivière des Galets or the cirque of Aurère.

Geologists long believed Réunion's cirques were calderas, but study of their layered deposits shows they were carved by collapse and erosion instead.

The entire cirque is public land managed by the forestry office, and residents rent their plots on concessions.

Children go to small single-class primary schools in the îlets, then must leave for the coast for secondary school, boarding with host families.

The ground orchid Eulophia borbonica, described only in 2002, is known from nowhere in the world except Mafate.

More than 30 km of tunnels bored through the mountains divert part of the water of Mafate and Salazie to the dry west of the island.

A helicopter company was even founded inside the cirque to handle its deliveries.

Why it is worth it

Mafate is a world without roads. One of the three great cirques carved into the Piton des Neiges massif on Réunion, it is a vast amphitheatre roughly 14 km long and 7 km wide, walled in by sheer cliffs that islanders call remparts. Its floor is anything but flat: ridges, ravines and narrow terraces drop from the 3,019-metre summit of Gros Morne to about 250 metres where the Rivière des Galets leaves the cirque through a gorge more than 7 km long. Since 2010 it has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage property "Pitons, cirques and remparts of Reunion Island", and it lies in the core of the Réunion National Park created in 2007.

The cirque was shaped by the collapse and massive debris avalanches of the flanks of an ancient shield volcano, followed by fierce erosion under the island's cyclonic rains. Inside, two ridges split it into separate compartments, and the hamlets sit on scraps of level ground called îlets: La Nouvelle, Marla, Roche Plate, Aurère, Grand Place, Îlet à Bourse, Îlet des Orangers and others, home to a few hundred people.

The first inhabitants were maroons, enslaved people who escaped from the coastal plantations and hid in the most inaccessible corners of the island; poor white farmers followed later. The name may come from the Malagasy word mahafaty, "deadly". Local tradition, popularised by the poet Eugène Dayot from 1848, ties it instead to Mafate, a maroon leader said to have camped by a foul-smelling hot spring in the river bed; the name only appeared on official maps in 1878. A small spa once stood at that spring until a landslide in 1913 destroyed it.

Life in the cirque is still shaped by isolation. Supplies, which porters and oxen once carried in on foot, now arrive by helicopter, and the houses run on solar panels and their own water catchments. Footpaths are the only way in, and the cirque has become one of the island's great hiking grounds, with dozens of gîtes in the îlets. Wild goats roam the ledges of the cliffs, and Barau's petrels, seabirds whose main breeding ground is Réunion, nest high on Gros Morne. The best views from a road are from the rim at Maïdo, Col des Bœufs and Cap Noir.

Getting there

No roads enter the cirque; access is on foot or by helicopter. Trails lead in from the Col des Bœufs on the Salazie side, from Col du Taïbit on the Cilaos side, from Maïdo, and from the west coast along the Rivière des Galets. The nearest town is La Possession, about 16 km away, and the nearest airport is Roland Garros Airport (RUN) near Saint-Denis, about 21 km away in a straight line.

Mafate

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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