AT A GLANCE
Why go?
On the limestone plateau of southwestern Rodrigues, the François Leguat Giant Tortoise and Cave Reserve offers something rare in the Indian Ocean: the chance to walk among hundreds of free-roaming giant tortoises in a landscape deliberately reconstructed to mirror what this island looked like before humans arrived. Opened in 2007 and named after the 18th-century Huguenot naturalist who documented Rodrigues' vanishing wildlife, the 20-hectare reserve combines a living conservation experiment with the only electrified show cave in the Southwest Indian Ocean.↗↗↗
A Window into Pre-Human Rodrigues
Rodrigues was once home to the densest populations of land tortoises ever recorded on any island on Earth. Two unique endemic species — the tall, saddle-backed Cylindraspis vosmaeri that browsed trees, and the low, dome-shelled Cylindraspis peltastes that grazed ground vegetation — lived in herds so thick that early settlers described them as unafraid and social. By 1770, an estimated 280,000 tortoises had been slaughtered or loaded onto ships, and both species had vanished. The fires that cleared the island for agriculture destroyed nearly everything else that made Rodrigues ecologically distinct.
