Chamarel is the name that sums up the most spectacular side of south-west Mauritius: a Creole village perched in the mountains where the earth has turned seven colours and a river plunges almost a hundred metres into the middle of the forest. Its star is the Terre des Sept Couleurs (Seven Coloured Earth), a field of rolling dunes of volcanic sand ranging from brick red to violet, through ochres, greens and bluish tones, a geological phenomenon with almost no equal in the world.
A few metres away, within the same Geopark, the Chamarel waterfall drops some 100 m through a basalt amphitheatre surrounded by tropical vegetation: it's the highest waterfall on the island and one of the most photographed viewpoints in Mauritius. A single ticket gives access to both, plus an enclosure with Aldabra giant tortoises, a café and a shop.
Chamarel is also rum country: the Rhumerie de Chamarel distils agricultural rum from the juice of its own sugar cane, and the village is full of tables with a view where you can eat Creole curry and the legendary Mauritian 'palm heart' (millionaire's salad). Since everything is in the mountains and there's no real public transport, the ideal plan is to rent a car (driving on the left) and string together the Geopark, the rhumerie and, if you like, carry on to Le Morne or Black River Gorges National Park, all just a short hop away.
The name Chamarel comes from Charles Antoine de Chazal de Chamarel, an 18th-century French settler who owned land in the area. The village grew up around the mountain's sugar cane and coffee plantations, worked first by enslaved Africans and Malagasy people and later by indentured Indian labourers; today it is a mostly Creole village. The multicoloured dunes formed from the breakdown of basaltic volcanic rock into ash rich in iron and aluminium oxides. The full history, from the volcanic origins of the land to today's Creole Mauritius, is on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The area around Le Morne mountain, a refuge for runaway slaves and a World Heritage Site, together with the volcanic landscapes of Chamarel and the island's last native forest.
Read the history of The west and south (Chamarel and Le Morne) →They depart from Mahebourg, 33 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Long before there was a French name, a settler or a village, Chamarel was already a quirk of geology. The whole of Mauritius is a volcanic island that rose from the floor of the Indian Ocean: between 8 and 10 million years ago, a series of eruptions piled basaltic lava over a hotspot in the Earth's crust, and later, between 3.5 million and about 20,000 years ago, new volcanic phases reshaped the landscape. The southwest, where Chamarel sits today, was left as a massif of steep mountains, plateaus and deep valleys.
The colours of the Terre des Sept Couleurs are the signature of that volcanic origin, but also of what came after: millions of years of tropical climate. The original basalt rock slowly broke down through the action of water, heat and humidity, in a process called laterisation. Along the way, the soluble minerals were washed out and the most stable metal oxides were left concentrated: above all iron oxides and hydroxides, which paint the reds, browns, ochres and oranges, and aluminium oxide, responsible for the bluish and greyish tones.
The astonishing part is that these colours don't mix, even when stirred. The explanation geologists accept is physical: each type of particle has a different density and size, so after rain or any disturbance they tend to settle back into layers, as if the ground sorted itself. On top of that, these ferralitic sands hold almost no water and don't let vegetation grow on them, so the dunes stay bare and exposed, showing off their palette in the open air. It is a rare phenomenon on the planet and, in Mauritius, it repeats on a smaller scale further south, at Chamouny.
The nearby waterfall tells the other half of the geological story: the water of the St Denis River drops almost a hundred metres over a ledge of columnar basalt, the rock that cracks into prisms as it cools, revealing in cross-section the old lava flow on which the whole landscape rests.
The name Chamarel is human and relatively recent. It comes from Charles Antoine de Chazal de Chamarel, a French settler who established himself in the area in the 18th century, when the island was called Isle de France and was a colony of the French kingdom. The Dutch had been the first Europeans to settle in Mauritius in the 17th century -and the ones who named the island after Prince Maurice of Nassau, as well as wiping out the dodo and exhausting the ebony forests-, but they abandoned it in 1710. France took possession in 1715 and, driven by governor Mahé de La Bourdonnais from 1735, turned it into a prosperous, strategic plantation colony on the route to India.
Within that framework, the highlands of the southwest were divided into land grants. The de Chazal de Chamarel family gave its name to the place, and over time Chamarel came to mean the village, the neighbouring peak and the whole district. As in the rest of the Isle de France, the local economy was built on sugar cane, coffee and spices, crops that demanded an enormous amount of labour.
For more than a century, that labour was enslaved. Thousands of Africans and Malagasy people were brought by force from the mainland and Madagascar to work the plantations. The mountainous southwest -Chamarel, Le Morne, Baie du Cap- was marked by that history: its slopes and caves served as refuge for runaway slaves (marrons), and that memory is still alive at neighbouring Le Morne Brabant, declared a World Heritage Site precisely for that reason.
In 1810, in the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, Britain seized the island from France after landing in the north and forcing the surrender of Port Louis; the matter was sealed in 1814 with the Treaty of Paris, and the Isle de France went back to being called Mauritius. The British nonetheless kept much of the French language, civil law and property system, which still explains why in Chamarel everyday life runs in French-based Creole rather than English.
The deepest change came in 1835, with the abolition of slavery in the British Empire. The former slaves, many of African and Malagasy origin, largely left the plantations and became the seed of the Creole population that predominates today in villages like Chamarel. To replace that workforce, the planters and the British government organised the mass arrival of indentured labourers from India: between 1834 and the early 20th century, almost half a million Indians landed at the Aapravasi Ghat in Port Louis -today also a World Heritage Site- to work the cane under contracts that often hid extremely harsh conditions.
Chamarel, like the whole country, thus became a mosaic: descendants of African and Malagasy slaves, of Hindu and Muslim Indian labourers, of Chinese merchants and of French settlers lived side by side and mixed. The village kept its mostly Creole and Catholic character -hence its Sainte-Anne church-, while the rest of the island filled up with Hindu temples, mosques and pagodas. Highland coffee and sugar cane remained, for generations, the mainstay of this mountain district.
For a long time, the Seven Coloured Earths were almost a local secret, a curious clearing of coloured dunes in the middle of the mountains that reached the ears of travellers and naturalists. With Mauritian independence in 1968 and, above all, with the take-off of beach tourism from the seventies and eighties onwards, Chamarel became one of the must-see stops on trips into the island's interior, alongside the sacred Hindu lake of Grand Bassin (Ganga Talao) and Black River Gorges National Park, created in 1994 to protect the last native forests.
The seven earths site was organised as a private geopark, with wooden platforms to protect the dunes from footsteps, trails to the waterfall viewpoint and an enclosure with Aldabra giant tortoises, the western Indian Ocean species related to the giant tortoises Mauritius had until hunting and invasive species wiped them out, just like the dodo.
At the same time, Chamarel revived its farming roots with a modern twist: in 2008 the Rhumerie de Chamarel opened, a distillery that makes island-style agricultural rum by distilling fresh juice from its own cane -not molasses, like industrial rum-, which brought value back to the mountain cane fields and added a food-and-drink stop that is now as popular as the dunes. The village completed its transformation with tables d'hôtes, panoramic restaurants and eco-lodges.
Today Chamarel is at once a geological phenomenon, a piece of Mauritius's Creole history and a showcase for its cuisine and its rum. Within a few square kilometres you can read the island's whole story: the volcanic fire that created it, the tropical rain that sculpted it, the cane that made it rich at the expense of slaves and indentured labourers, and the tourism that, for better and for worse, reinvented it in the 21st century.
