Saint-Denis Audio Tours

Saint-Denis sits at the northern tip of Reunion Island, where the slopes of the Piton des Neiges, at 3,069 metres the highest point in the Indian Ocean, funnel down toward the coast. The city was founded in 1669 and served as the administrative capital of French Reunion, which remains an overseas department of France rather than a territory or colony, meaning its residents vote in French elections, pay in euros, and hold French passports while living in the tropics of the southern Indian Ocean.

The colonial heritage of the city is visible in the cathedral completed in 1832, the Hotel de Ville from the 1840s, and the grid of streets that were laid out with a European formality that the tropical vegetation has been quietly subverting ever since.

The Noor-e-Islam mosque, built in 1905, is the oldest mosque on French soil outside Mayotte, which tells you something about the diversity of communities that found their way to this island through the slave trade, Indian Ocean migration, and French administrative appetite for human resources. Tamil temples, Chinese shrines, and Creole rum shops occupy the same few streets.