Le Morne, a mountain of memory for runaway slaves

A rock facing the ocean

At the far south-western tip of Mauritius, Le Morne Brabant raises a 556-metre basalt monolith above the lagoons. Its sheer, wooded and almost inaccessible cliffs made it, in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a refuge for escaped slaves known as "maroons". They formed small settlements in caves and even on the summit.

World Heritage since 2008

UNESCO inscribed the Le Morne Cultural Landscape on the World Heritage List in 2008 (with a minor boundary change in 2011). It describes the site as an exceptional testimony to marronage, or resistance to slavery, and as "a symbol of slaves' fight for freedom". That symbolism reaches beyond Mauritius, to the places the enslaved came from: mainland Africa, Madagascar, India and South-East Asia.

As the legend goes: the leap of 1835

Slavery was abolished in Mauritius on 1 February 1835. According to oral tradition, a police expedition was then sent to Le Morne to tell the maroons they were now free. Seeing the soldiers approach, those hiding on the summit supposedly believed they were about to be captured, and chose to leap to their deaths rather than return to bondage.

To be clear: this episode is not documented in the archives and remains a legend. Yet UNESCO stresses that it is precisely these oral traditions, handed down over generations, that give the place its symbolic value. Le Morne has become the image of the suffering and sacrifice of the enslaved.

A place of remembrance

Every 1 February, a public holiday in Mauritius, the abolition of slavery is commemorated here; the Creole community in particular has marked it since 1987. At the foot of the mountain, a Slave Route monument bears an extract from Richard Sedley Assonne's poem "Le Morne Territoire Marron", which speaks of maroons who chose "the kiss of death" over chains.

Visiting with respect

You can hike Le Morne, ideally with a guide and early in the morning, and take in the view over the lagoon. Remember that you are walking on a site of memory: take a moment at the monument before or after the climb.