Le Saint Géran has been on Belle Mare Beach since 1975 — the same year that the Mauritius tourism industry began converting the island’s colonial sugar estate economy into the Indian Ocean luxury resort market, and at the same time as the three or four properties that defined what Indian Ocean luxury meant before the…
Every serious Indian Ocean destination eventually gets compared to the Maldives, and the comparison is almost always a mistake — not because the Maldives doesn’t deserve its reputation, but because it obscures what the other destinations are actually offering. Mauritius is not a flatter, less isolated version of the Maldives. It is a fundamentally different…
The east coast of Mauritius does not announce itself. The road from the airport runs south before cutting east through sugarcane fields and small towns, and the approach to Belle Mare is quiet enough that the resort’s entrance — a gate, a driveway, a sudden expansiveness of tropical garden — arrives with a slight sense…