SSR Botanic Garden, Mauritius

5EmJ 5:00 PM Nov 8, 2022

Pleasant visit to gardens with a lot of history
A lovely way to spend a few hours, definitely recommend joining a tour when you get to the gardens - the authorised guides wait by the entrance, no need to book in advance & they provide excellent value for money in showing you around the gardens & explaining all of the different plant species you will see. It would be a pleasant enough place to wander around yourself but having the interpretation added another dimension, learning the plant names and uses, which ones are worth smelling!, marvelling at the sizes and ages of some and feeling privileged to see a palm in bloom that takes 100 years to flower just once. The collection is a mix of some native species but also exotic species collected by French and English botanists over the centuries those nations governed the island. The gardens are a piece of history in themselves, we also took some time to walk around the ‘Mon Plaisir’ house (you can’t go inside, but look at the building from the outside) and read all the plaques on the trees nearby planted by various visiting dignitaries over the decades since Mauritius has been an independent nation, and the samadhi of Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam himself, this is an important place for modern Mauritius as well. There is a small animal area with a few Aldabra tortoises to see - these are the Seychellois species that was introduced to replace the endemic species that went extinct - they do fulfil an important part of the ecosystem, spreading plant seeds in the forest, if you want to see them in a more naturalistic setting I recommend the Mauritian Wildlife Foundation’s ecotour to Ile Aux Aigrettes where you can see them as they should be, doing their job to help preserve & maintain the native habitat. The Aldabran tortoises were bought to Mauritius at the behest of Charles Darwin who feared for their future on Aldabra, so seeing any of these creatures is a lovely link to history. There is also a deer pen, and easy to spot wildlife in the gardens include various common bird species (mynah, bulbuls, red/cardinal fody) as well as the Mauritian flying fox (fruit bat). The gardens were easy to drive to independently & parking is free, as an aside we definitely recommend hiring a car for your stay in Mauritius, driving is easy (on the left, roads are decent and other drivers generally safe and courteous) and it gives you complete freedom to explore as you please and not just be restricted to where a tour will take you. Our car hire for the whole week cost us a little more than 1 day tour for 2 people + the taxi to/from the airport/hotel, we also hired a wifi box with the car which meant we could use our phones as SatNav & look up any info we needed online at any time to facilitate our adventures. .

4coop1973 5:00 PM Oct 10, 2022

Interesting tour
We thoroughly enjoyed our morning at the gardens. After reading other reviews we paid the small additional amount for a guide and I'd definitely recommend this. Our guide was very knowledgeable and pointed out so many things we would never have known about otherwise. We had 3 or 4 different nationalities in our group and the guide spoke in all languages!