Pamplemousses Botanical Garden, Le Pouce and Signal Mountain

Two of the finest natural and botanical sights in Mauritius lie less than twenty minutes outside central Port Louis: the 18th-century spice and water-lily gardens of Pamplemousses just up the northern highway, and the volcanic hiking trails of Signal Mountain and Le Pouce rising directly behind the harbour.

SSR (Pamplemousses) Botanical Garden and L'Aventure du Sucre

Roughly eleven kilometres north-east of Port Louis along the M2 motorway (a fifteen-minute taxi or northern bus ride from Victoria Terminal), the Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanical Garden in Pamplemousses is the oldest botanical garden in the Southern Hemisphere. Originally laid out in 1735 as a kitchen garden by Mahé de La Bourdonnais around the Château de Mon Plaisir, it was transformed in 1770 by French royal intendant and botanist Pierre Poivre, who smuggled clove and nutmeg seedlings from the Spice Islands to break the Dutch monopoly. Today its thirty-seven hectares hold 85 varieties of palms from around the tropics (including the giant talipot palm, which grows for up to sixty years before sending up a single colossal plume of millions of flowers and dying), a pen of Aldabra giant tortoises, and the famous rectangular pond of giant Amazon water lilies (Victoria amazonica) whose upturned, pie-dish rims reach nearly two metres across.

Directly across the road at Beau Plan stands L'Aventure du Sucre, a magnificent interactive museum inside a converted 1797 sugar factory that explains how sugarcane shaped Mauritius's economy, slavery and indentured history, ending with a tasting of unrefined dark muscovado sugars and local agricultural rums.

Hiking Signal Mountain and Le Pouce in the Moka Range

Looking back at Port Louis, the jagged wall of the Moka Range forms an ancient volcanic caldera rim with two accessible climbs:

• Signal Mountain (Montagne des Signaux, 323 m): a paved, traffic-free tarmac path winds up from the western edge of Port Louis, popular with locals jogging in the late afternoon for golden sunset views straight down over Caudan Waterfront and the Indian Ocean.
• Le Pouce ("The Thumb", 812 m): the third-highest peak in Mauritius, climbed by Charles Darwin during the voyage of HMS Beagle in 1836. Start from the village of Petit Verger in Saint Pierre (Moka) on the plateau side for a shaded two-hour ascent through wild guava and eucalyptus up to the grassy shoulder beneath the thumb rock, where both coasts of the island open up at once before you descend to Moka or Balaclava.