Cirque de Salazie
The waterfalls cirque
A 1-hour-45-minute drive through the northern part of the island brings you to the greenest and wettest of the three cirques.
The road winds up the narrow gorge of the Mât River, and the landscape changes every hundred meters: roll down your window to catch a glimpse of the Blanche Waterfall, which plunges 640 meters down the cliff face. Its long white trail seems suspended from the vegetation-covered walls. For an even more thrilling experience, take one of the trails leading down to the pools at the base of the waterfalls. Further up along the same cliffs, admire the Voile de la Mariée waterfall from the road. It ranks Réunion among Europe’s most impressive waterfall destinations.
At the end of the road lies Hell-Bourg, listed among the Most Beautiful Villages of France—the only village in the Indian Ocean to hold this distinction. A former 19th-century spa town, it has preserved its Creole houses with lambrequins, its gardens overflowing with hydrangeas and anthuriums, and the ruins of its old thermal baths. La Maison Folio, a bourgeois mansion open to visitors with a garden planted with endemic species, is the best introduction to understanding the Creole way of life of that era.