Paradise Found

Mauritius is a lush island oasis with a melting pot of languages and cultures. Attitude's travel editor meets some of its LGBTQ+ residents to uncover what life is really like here

- Markus Bidaux

Mauritius is a little piece of paradise, an island of lush, green, sugar-cane fields as far as the eye can see and jagged mountains creating a dramatic landscape that's surrounded by pristine beaches and turquoise waters. But this little slice of heaven comes with a dark past, for which its queer community are still paying the price today.

A dot in the Indian ocean some 700 miles east of Madagascar, off the south-eastern coast of Africa, Mauritius is one of the three-island archipelago, the Mascarene Islands. It is populated mainly by people of Indian descent and Mauritian Creoles from Sub-Saharan Africa brought there by European countries who between them dominated the island for centuries.

It was first mapped as an uninhabited isle by the Portuguese in the 16th century, until Dutch seafarers set up home and named it in honour of their Prince Maurice Van Nassau. Then, in the 18th century, the French, who already controlled Mauritius's sister island Réunion, took over and renamed it Isle de France. In 1810, the British seized it and rechristened it Mauritius, occupying it until 1968 when the island won independence.