Piton de la Fournaise — volcano
Image by ocebenphoto from Pixabay

Piton de la Fournaise

  • Elevation2,621 m
  • 2 min read
  • 21.243° S 55.707° E

Interesting facts

  • The volcano is more than 530,000 years old, and its summit has collapsed to form calderas three times, roughly 250,000, 65,000 and 5,000 years ago.
  • Commerson Crater, an extinct caldera on its flank, received 6,433 mm of rain in 15 days during Cyclone Hyacinthe in 1980, a world record for a tropical cyclone.
  • Some beaches near the volcano are green, coloured by olivine crystals weathered out of its picrite basalt lavas.
  • During the April 2007 eruption the volcano poured out an estimated three million cubic metres of lava a day.
  • Only six eruptions have been recorded outside the caldera, the most recent in 1986.
  • Where lava has cut the coastal highway, signs mark each crossing with the year of the eruption.
  • An explosive eruption about 4,700 years ago may have reached VEI 5, comparable in scale to Mount St Helens in 1980.
  • The volcano's eastern flank is slowly sliding seaward, and scientists study it as a possible source of a large Indian Ocean tsunami.
  • Its lavas are notably rich in iridium, a metal rare in the Earth's crust.
  • Réunion's residents often call it simply le Volcan, and its Dolomieu crater honours the French geologist Déodat de Dolomieu.

Why it is worth it

The Piton de la Fournaise — "the peak of the furnace" — is the living half of Réunion. While the island's older volcano, the Piton des Neiges, has been quiet for some 20,000 years and eroded into three great cirques, this shield volcano on the southeast keeps building new land: more than 150 eruptions have been recorded since the seventeenth century, and it is counted among the most active volcanoes on the planet. Its summit reaches 2,621 metres, but what draws people is less the height than the chance to walk across a landscape that is visibly still being made.

The heart of it is the Enclos Fouqué, a horseshoe-shaped caldera about eight kilometres across, walled on three sides by cliffs 100 to 400 metres high and open to the sea on the fourth. From the rim at Pas de Bellecombe you look down onto a floor of black and rust-coloured lava, crossed by flows of different ages, with a 400-metre shield rising in the middle and the summit craters on top. The largest, Dolomieu, is about a kilometre long and 700 metres wide; in April 2007, during one of the largest eruptions on record, its floor dropped by more than 300 metres over nine days, turning a shallow pit into the vast chasm seen today. Beside it lies the smaller Bory crater, and on the way down into the Enclos the small scoria cone of Formica Leo, named for its resemblance to an antlion's sand trap.

The approach is part of the experience. The forest road from the Plaine des Cafres climbs to the Plaine des Sables, a bare plateau of red and ochre scoria around 2,000–2,200 metres that looks more like Mars than an Indian Ocean island. On the other side of the Enclos, where the caldera opens to the sea, the lower slopes of the Grand Brûlé carry fresh flows straight across the coast road; lava has cut it many times and reached the ocean, most recently in 2026. At Piton Sainte-Rose, lava in 1977 surrounded the village church and entered its door without bringing it down — it has been known since as Notre-Dame-des-Laves.

The volcano is watched closely by an observatory founded in 1978 at Bourg-Murat and run by the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris, and it lies within Réunion National Park, whose peaks, cirques and ramparts are a UNESCO World Heritage site. The classic walk leaves Pas de Bellecombe, descends into the Enclos and crosses the lava to the rim of Dolomieu: roughly 12 km there and back, with about 550 m of climbing, usually five hours or more.

Getting there

The volcano rises in the southeast of Réunion; Saint-Joseph on the south coast is about 18 km away, and Saint-Pierre Pierrefonds Airport (ZSE) about 31 km. Most long-haul flights arrive at Roland Garros Airport near Saint-Denis on the north coast. By road, the Route du Volcan leaves Bourg-Murat on the Plaine des Cafres and runs to the car park at Pas de Bellecombe — paved as far as the Plaine des Sables, then unsurfaced. The coast road through the Grand Brûlé gives the view of the flows from below.

On these lists

The Most Beautiful Volcanoes 61The Most Beautiful Natural Wonders 580

From the encyclopaedia

Piton de la Fournaise is a shield volcano on the eastern side of Réunion island, a French overseas department and region, in the Indian Ocean. It is currently one of the most active volcanoes in the world, along with Kīlauea in the Hawaiian Islands, Stromboli and Etna in Italy and Mount Erebus in Antarctica. The volcano is located within Réunion National Park, a World Heritage Site.

Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0

-21.24312, 55.70724per Wikidata