🇲🇺 Mauritius
Port Louis
Port Louis is the capital and largest city of Mauritius (150,000 in the city, 450,000 in the greater urban area), an island republic in the Indian Ocean 2,000 km east of Madagascar, and one of the most remarkable development stories of the post-colonial world. Mauritius was uninhabited until the 1598 Dutch colonization, subsequently controlled by the French (1715–1810, who brought enslaved Africans and began sugar cultivation) and British (1810–1968), achieved independence in 1968 and has since become Africa's highest per-capita income country ($12,000 GDP per capita) through an economic model that combined sugar exports, export processing zones for textiles and, since the 1990s, financial services and luxury tourism — making it simultaneously the most prosperous, most stable and best-governed country in sub-Saharan Africa (top of the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance for multiple years). The island of Mauritius is also the location of one of history's most famous extinctions — the dodo (Raphus cucullatus), a flightless pigeon found nowhere else, was hunted to extinction by Dutch sailors by the 1680s and has become the global symbol of human-caused species loss. Port Louis itself sits in a natural harbour bowl surrounded by the Moka mountains (828 m), with the Champ de Mars (the oldest horse racing track in the southern hemisphere, 1812) and the Colonial Quarter as its cultural core. The Central Market (the most vibrant local market in the Indian Ocean) and the Caudan Waterfront (the post-independence commercial development) represent Port Louis's two faces — the authentic market city and the aspirational financial capital. The cuisine of Port Louis reflects the extraordinary ethnic mix of the island: Creole, Indo-Mauritian (Hindu and Muslim), Sino-Mauritian and Franco-Mauritian cooking traditions coexist in a culinary culture as diverse as any in the Indian Ocean region.