Pieter Both, the mountain with a stone head

A silhouette you won't forget

Drive from Port Louis towards the centre of the island and you can't miss it: a ridge in the Moka range whose summit looks like a head set on a pair of shoulders. Pieter Both rises to 820 metres, making it the second-highest mountain in Mauritius, only a few metres behind Piton de la Petite Rivière Noire. The "head" on top is a block of rock roughly nine metres across, balanced so improbably that visitors wonder how it stays put.

A name inherited from the Dutch

The mountain is named after Pieter Both, the first Governor-General of the Dutch East Indies. Sailing home to the Netherlands, he drowned on 6 March 1615 when two ships of his fleet were wrecked at Flic-en-Flac, on Mauritius's west coast. The Dutch had not yet settled the island at that point, but their ships already stopped there.

As the legend goes: the milkman turned to stone

Mauritians tell a very different story about the boulder. According to legend, as retold by the Mauritian daily Defimedia, a milkman from Crève-Cœur, a village at the foot of the mountain, sold his milk in nearby villages. One day he took a shortcut over the slopes of Pieter Both and dozed off. He woke to music and saw fairies dancing and singing. They made him promise to tell no one, or he would be turned to stone. The milkman couldn't keep the secret and told his friends. The angry fairies turned him to stone: his head swelled and rose to the summit, where it still sits today.

This is a folk tale passed down by word of mouth, not a historical fact. But it says a lot about how islanders have filled their landscape with stories.

First climbed in 1832

Long thought impossible to reach, the summit was first climbed on 7 September 1832 by a party of British officers: Captain Lloyd and Lieutenants Phillpotts, Keppel and Taylor. Iron rungs fixed into the rock now help climbers over the final section.

Seeing it and climbing it

Pieter Both is easy to admire from the Port Louis road or the Moka area. The hike to the "shoulders" is demanding, and reaching the head is a real climb: go with a qualified guide, start early and avoid rainy days, when the rock turns slippery.