Réunion

Réunion is a French island in the western Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar and southwest of Mauritius, one of the Mascarene Islands. It is an overseas department and region of France with Saint-Denis as its capital and largest city. French is the only official language, but Réunion Creole is the language most people speak.

No one lived on the island until the 17th century. France claimed it in 1642, when Jacques Pronis left a dozen mutineers there from Madagascar, named it Île Bourbon in 1649 and sent the first settlers through the French East India Company in 1665. Planters grew coffee and later sugarcane. The revolutionaries renamed it Réunion in 1793, Britain captured it in 1810, and the Treaty of Paris returned it to France in 1814. In 1841 Edmond Albius found how to pollinate vanilla flowers by hand, which made the island a major vanilla grower. Contract workers known as engagés, many from South India, came until 1864.

The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 took away much of its role as a stop on the route to the Indies. Réunion became an overseas department on 19 March 1946, and between 1963 and 1982 the state moved 1,630 children to rural areas of mainland France, many to Creuse. French law applies as in mainland France, with a regional and a departmental council, and the island is an outermost region of the European Union that uses the euro. It also hosts the headquarters of the French armed forces in the southern Indian Ocean.

The island covers 2,512 km² (970 sq mi) and rises to 3,070 m (10,070 ft) at Piton des Neiges, while Piton de la Fournaise in the east is an active shield volcano. Erosion carved three great cirques, Salazie, Mafate and Cilaos, and the heart of the island became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2010. Sugar was long the main export, and tourism, trade and rum shipped to Europe now support the economy. Bourbon roses first appeared here, and its music has two forms, the sega, a Creole form of the quadrille, and the maloya, which came from Africa and is found only on Réunion.