Coco Island -Île aux Cocos- is one of the least-known natural treasures of the Republic of Mauritius, and getting there means going a long way: it isn't off the main island but next to Rodrigues, the small sister island lost in the Indian Ocean, about 560 km to the northeast. It's a tiny sandy islet surrounded by crystal-clear water, declared a nature reserve, that works as a seabird sanctuary.
Thousands of birds nest on its few hectares: above all terns (sterna), noddies (brun and marianne) and other seabirds that fill the sky over the islet with their flights and their noise. It's an extraordinary natural spectacle, very different from the resort tourism of mainland Mauritius: here conservation comes first, so access is regulated and you can only visit on guided, authorised trips.
The visit is a day-long ecotourism experience from Rodrigues: you cross the lagoon by boat -one of the largest in the world relative to the size of its island-, land at low tide, walk the marked trails with a guide who explains the ecology of the place, and there's usually time for snorkelling and a Creole lunch on the beach. For travellers who make it to Rodrigues, Île aux Cocos is almost a must and one of the best reasons to discover this quiet, authentic island that is still safe from mass tourism.
Île aux Cocos is a sandy islet off the west coast of Rodrigues, Mauritius's sister island in the Indian Ocean. Historically its birds and eggs were exploited, and rats and other pests were introduced that decimated the colonies. In the 20th century it was declared a nature reserve, and today it is managed as a seabird sanctuary, with access restricted to guided trips. The full story -from Rodrigues and the solitaire to the conservation of the reserve- is on the history page.
Read the full history ↓The southeast around Grand Port, where the Dutch landed and the 1810 naval battle was fought, together with the Mahébourg lagoon and the turquoise islets of the east coast.
Read the history of The east and the islets →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
To understand Île aux Cocos, you have to start with Rodrigues, the island it belongs to. Lying some 560 kilometres north-east of Mauritius, in the middle of the Indian Ocean, Rodrigues is the smallest and most isolated of the Mascarene Islands, the volcanic trio completed by Mauritius and French Réunion. It rose from a volcano around 1.5 million years ago and has since worn down into modest, hilly terrain. It is surrounded by a huge lagoon: the reef that encircles it holds a stretch of water several times larger than the island itself, one of the largest in the world relative to the size of its island. Île aux Cocos sits in that lagoon, which is dotted with sandbanks and islets.
Like Mauritius, Rodrigues had no human population until colonial times. Arab sailors sighted it, and later the Portuguese in the 16th century (its name comes from the explorer Diogo Rodrigues), but it stayed uninhabited for a long time. Its endemic wildlife evolved in complete isolation and produced some remarkable creatures: the Rodrigues solitaire, a flightless bird related to the dodo and now extinct, and giant land tortoises that roamed the island in their tens of thousands.
That unique natural world, free of predators and people, was bound to suffer the same fate as Mauritius's once the settlers arrived, along with their ships and the animals they brought. Île aux Cocos, a handful of sand and birds in the middle of the lagoon, would become one of the victims of that story and, much later, one of its rescues.
The first attempt to settle Rodrigues was made by a group of Huguenots (French Protestants) led by François Leguat, who arrived in 1691 fleeing religious persecution and lived there for a couple of years. Leguat left a famous account of an island teeming with giant tortoises and birds, a picture of abundance that would soon be destroyed. Through the 18th and 19th centuries, first under French and then British rule, Rodrigues was used as the colony's larder. Tens of thousands of giant tortoises were hunted and shipped to Mauritius and Réunion until they were wiped out in the wild.
The islets in the lagoon, such as Île aux Cocos and Île aux Sables, went through their own version of this plunder. Their seabird colonies of terns and noddies were an easy source of meat and, above all, of eggs, which fishermen and visitors gathered in huge numbers. On top of that came a quiet but devastating threat: rats and other introduced animals arrived on the boats and destroyed nests, eggs and chicks. By the early 20th century the islet's colonies had been badly depleted, and some species had vanished from Rodrigues altogether.
Meanwhile, Rodrigues was slowly settled by the descendants of freed African and Malagasy slaves and by a few colonists. Together they formed a Creole, Catholic, fishing society, quite different from the Indo-Mauritian mix of the main island. This small population lived off fishing in the lagoon, subsistence farming and livestock, on a poor island that the central government in Port Louis largely forgot.
Over the 20th century, attitudes gradually changed. As people grasped the scale of the extinctions in the Mascarenes (the dodo on Mauritius, the solitaire and the tortoises on Rodrigues), they began to value what could still be saved. Despite everything it had been through, Île aux Cocos was still a nesting site for seabirds, and because it was an isolated islet it could be protected well if the introduced pests were brought under control.
So the islet was declared a nature reserve and access was restricted: collecting eggs and birds was banned, rats were controlled, and visits were only allowed with authorised rangers or guides. Over time, programmes were added to eradicate invasive species and monitor the colonies, in line with the major conservation efforts that made the whole Mauritian archipelago famous. With protection, the tern and noddy populations began to recover, and the islet filled once again with the noise of thousands of birds.
At the same time, Rodrigues was gaining autonomy. In 2002 it was granted regional autonomy within the Republic of Mauritius, with its own Regional Assembly, which gave it more control over its land and natural resources, including the Île aux Cocos reserve. The island chose small-scale ecotourism, very different from the resort tourism of Mauritius, and turned its nature (the birds, the lagoon, the tortoises reintroduced at François Leguat) into its main attraction and a source of pride and income for its community.
Today Île aux Cocos is both a strictly protected reserve and one of the best-loved excursions on Rodrigues. That combination sums up the island's philosophy: show off its nature without destroying it. Visits are made in small groups, always with a guide, following set paths and times dictated by the tides, and with clear rules: take nothing, don't disturb the birds, and carry all your rubbish out. The money visitors bring in helps pay for the islet's conservation and surveillance.
For travellers it's an unforgettable experience, and very different from postcard Mauritius. You cross the vast turquoise lagoon by boat, step off onto a sandbank in the middle of the sea, walk among thousands of terns and noddies flying and nesting just a few metres away, snorkel over healthy reefs and have octopus curry for lunch on the beach. This is ecotourism done right, on one of the last islands in the Indian Ocean that still has the calm and authenticity Mauritius lost decades ago.
The story of Île aux Cocos, from the abundance Leguat described to the near disappearance of its birds and on to the restored reserve of today, is the story of the whole archipelago in miniature: a natural paradise badly wounded by people and partly healed by them too, once they decided to look after it. Visiting it means seeing that lesson up close and, along the way, discovering Rodrigues, the small, quiet sister island that many consider the most genuine corner of the Republic of Mauritius.
