Port Louis

Port Louis grew from 1735, when the French governor Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais made the sheltered bay on the leeward coast the naval base and shipbuilding centre of the Isle de France. It had a reason to exist that the rest of the island did not: a deep natural harbour protected from the prevailing south-easterly trade winds, where ships on the route to India could refit. La Bourdonnais put up numerous buildings, among them part of Government House and the Line Barracks, and the port became the base from which French corsairs raided British shipping during the Napoleonic wars.

Britain took the island in 1810 and kept the harbour as its own, while French remained the language of much of the island's daily life. The decisive change came after the abolition of slavery in 1835, when planters turned to indentured labour from India. Between 1849 and 1923 about half a million people passed through the immigration depot at the water's edge, Aapravasi Ghat, and were registered, quarantined and sent on to the sugar estates. The city around it filled with Indian, Chinese, Creole and European quarters, each with its own places of worship.

The 19th century also brought disaster: malaria in the late 19th century drove much of the population from the coast up to the cooler plateau towns, leaving Port Louis as a place of work rather than of residence — a pattern that still holds. Cyclones, fires and the decline of sail all cost it trade, but the container port and the free port rebuilt its importance in the late 20th century, the Caudan Waterfront turned a stretch of the old docks towards visitors from the late 1990s, and the Metro Express reached the city in 2019.

The capital is where the island's communities meet most visibly. Within a short walk are the Jummah Mosque, Tamil and Hindu temples, a cathedral, Chinese pagodas and the shrine of Père Laval, and the public holidays of all of them are kept by the whole city. Cavadee brings Tamil devotees through the streets in January or February; the Chinese Spring Festival fills Chinatown with firecrackers and lion dances; Divali lights the shopfronts in autumn; and the September pilgrimage to Sainte-Croix draws crowds to the tomb of a missionary who worked among former slaves.

Racing is the city's great secular ritual. The Champ de Mars, inaugurated in 1812 and the oldest racecourse in the southern hemisphere, sits at the edge of the centre, and on a race day between late March and early December the slopes above the track fill with tens of thousands of people; the rivalry between the stables is followed with the intensity given elsewhere to football. Sega, the drum-led music that grew out of the songs of enslaved Mauritians, is heard at festivals and in bars.

Daily manners are formal by island standards: French and English are used in offices, Creole everywhere else, and most people move between all three without thinking about it. Dress in the business quarter is neat, elders are addressed with care, and the mixing of religious calendars is treated as ordinary rather than remarkable.

About 147,000 people lived in Port Louis at the 2018 census, while the daytime population swells far beyond it. The capital is the country's administrative and financial centre: ministries, the Bank of Mauritius, the stock exchange, the courts and the offshore financial sector are all here, along with the container port and the free-port zone that handle much of the island's trade.

The working day starts early and ends early. Buses pour into Victoria and Immigration squares from first light, the market is at its height by mid-morning, offices empty in the middle of the afternoon, and by evening the business streets are quiet while life continues in the residential quarters — Plaine Verte, Vallée des Prêtres, Sainte-Croix, Cassis — that climb the slopes behind the centre. Sunday is genuinely still.

The pressures are those of a compact tropical capital: traffic congestion on the approach roads, flash flooding when heavy rain runs off the mountains into the narrow streets, and a shortage of affordable housing that has pushed poorer households into older districts. The Metro Express, running from the waterfront up the hill towards the plateau towns, was built to answer the first of these, and has changed the shape of the daily commute.

Port Louis is the best place on the island to eat cheaply and well. The signature is dholl puri, considered a national dish: thin split-pea flatbreads wrapped around bean curry, tomato rougaille and chilli or coriander chutney, eaten standing up from a cart, often with a plastic cup of alouda, a sweet cold milk drink, from the market. Around it are gâteaux piments, deep-fried split-pea and chilli fritters, boulettes of fish or meat with chouchou served in broth.

Chinatown's kitchens have given the island some of its most widely eaten dishes: fried noodles and fried rice, and bol renversé — the "upside-down bowl" of rice, meat, greens and a fried egg turned out onto a plate. The Creole tradition contributes rougaille, a tomato stew of fish, sausage or corned beef, vindaye, fish or octopus cooked with vinegar, mustard seed and turmeric, and cari with brèdes, the leafy greens that accompany almost every home-cooked meal.

The Central Market is the place for fruit, vegetables, spices and herbs, while the Caudan Waterfront has the sit-down restaurants, seafood and cafés. To drink there is strong island-grown tea, Phoenix beer, and local rum.