Flic en Flac is the big beach on the west coast of Mauritius: a very long strip of white sand and filao trees facing a calm lagoon, famous for two things it does better than anywhere else: sunsets (the sun sinks into the sea right in front of you) and diving. It's a relaxed, family-friendly village with plenty of places to stay and eat at every price.
The west is the driest and sunniest part of the island, ideal if you travel during the east's rainy season. Underwater, Flic en Flac hides some of the best dive sites in Mauritius, such as La Cathédrale, with its arches, caverns and colourful fish. On land, it's a stone's throw from the Casela adventure park, the Tamarind Falls and Black River Gorges National Park.
As a base, it's perfect for exploring the west and the wild south: Tamarin and its dolphins, Chamarel and its seven-coloured earth, Le Morne and its World Heritage mountain, all less than an hour away. A wide beach, movie-worthy sunsets, first-class diving and nature on your doorstep: Flic en Flac offers a more active, less resort-style Mauritius than the north.
From a coast of sugar cane fields and fishing in the Black River district to a west-coast resort town, Flic en Flac grew with modern Mauritian tourism. Its curious name and its history, along with the story of how the island was settled, are on the Flic en Flac 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 Grand Baie, 37 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.
Few place names in Mauritius are as curious as 'Flic en Flac'. It isn't Creole or French: the most widely accepted explanation is that it comes from an old Dutch expression, 'Fried Landt Flaak', meaning something like 'free and flat land'. The name would have survived from the Dutch period on the island in the 17th century, reshaped over the centuries by different languages.
It's a small detail, but a telling one. Mauritius had no human population until the Europeans arrived, so even the names of its beaches are immigrants: Dutch, French, Indian, Creole. Flic en Flac, with its playful sound, is a reminder that everything here (languages, people, plants and even place names) came by ship and mixed until it became the island's own.
The Dutch were the first to settle on the island, in 1638, and named it Mauritius in honour of Prince Maurice of Nassau. They explored its coasts, cut down its valuable ebony and named many places, probably including this 'flat land' in the west. But they are best remembered for an ecological disaster: the extinction of the dodo.
The dodo was a large, flightless bird that had evolved without predators. Sailors hunted it, and the animals they brought with them (pigs, rats, monkeys) wiped it out. By the end of the 17th century there were none left, and it became the world's symbol of extinction caused by humans. Beaten by cyclones, rats and poor harvests, the Dutch left Mauritius in 1710, and the island was deserted once again.
In 1715 France took possession of the island and renamed it Isle de France. The west, in the district of Rivière Noire (Black River), was covered with sugar cane plantations worked by thousands of enslaved people brought from mainland Africa and Madagascar. The economy made the colonists rich and was brutal for the enslaved, who faced gruelling working days and cruel punishment.
This southwestern region holds one of the hardest chapters of that history, and also one of the most dignified. A few kilometres from Flic en Flac rises Le Morne Brabant, the mountain where, according to oral tradition, runaway slaves (the 'marrons') took refuge. Today Le Morne is a UNESCO World Heritage Site precisely as a global symbol of resistance to slavery, a memorial to those who chose the mountain over chains. For all its quiet beauty, the west also carries that memory.
In 1810 the British conquered the island, and in 1814 it was renamed Mauritius under British rule. They were politically shrewd and let the French colonists keep their language, religion and customs, which is why French and Creole still dominate daily life. The event that transformed society was the abolition of slavery in 1835.
Short of labour, the landowners turned to indentured work: hundreds of thousands of workers from India landed in Port Louis and were sent to plantations all over the island, including those in the west. That migration gave rise to Mauritius's Hindu majority, alongside Muslim and Chinese communities and the descendants of the enslaved, who created Creole culture and sega. From then on, villages like those in the Black River district were home to all the communities that make up the Mauritian mosaic.
Mauritius became independent from the United Kingdom on 12 March 1968, with Seewoosagur Ramgoolam as the nation's first leader, and it became a republic in 1992. The new Mauritius diversified its economy beyond sugar, with textiles, finance and tourism as its new pillars. The sunny beaches of the west, until then an area of cane fields and fishing, began to draw visitors.
Flic en Flac, with its very long west-facing beach and its sunsets over the sea, became one of the most popular resorts on the island, especially loved by Mauritians themselves, who fill its picnic areas at weekends. The big resorts arrived, but so did affordable guesthouses and restaurants, and the Dutch 'flat land' came to mean sun, diving and beach life on the dry side of Mauritius.
Today Flic en Flac brings together the best of western Mauritius: a big public beach open to everyone, the island's finest sunsets and some of its most famous dive sites, such as La Cathédrale, with its underwater arches and caves. All around it is the greener, more adventurous side of Mauritius: Casela park, Tamarind Falls, Black River Gorges National Park (the last great refuge of the island's forest and endemic wildlife) and, further south, Tamarin, Chamarel and Le Morne.
It's a base where you can switch between beach and mountain, lagoon and forest, leisure and the history of slavery that marks this corner of the island. Behind the playful name the Dutch left us four centuries ago, Flic en Flac sums up the whole journey of Mauritius: from an empty, flat land to a human mosaic facing one of the most beautiful seas on the planet.
The Black River district, where Flic en Flac lies, also holds the island's greatest natural treasure: high up in Black River Gorges survive the last native forests and endemic species that came close to disappearing, such as the Mauritius kestrel (down to just four living birds in the 1970s) and the pink pigeon. Their recovery, thanks to conservation programmes recognised around the world, is the hopeful flip side of the dodo story: proof that the same island that lost its most famous bird also learned to bring others back from the brink. So a visitor who comes down from the forests of the interior to the beach at Flic en Flac crosses, in just a few kilometres, the two faces of Mauritius: the irreversible extinctions of the past, and a natural world that people are now working hard, and knowingly, to preserve for the generations to come.
