Hiking Reunion Island: Cirques, Volcanoes, and Vanishing Trails
Day 1 — Saint-Denis to Cilaos: 400 Hairpin Turns
Pick up a rental car at Roland Garros Airport (32 EUR/day for a Peugeot 208, manual — automatic costs more, and you want the engine braking on mountain roads). From there, the coast highway runs south to the turnoff for Cilaos.
The road to Cilaos has roughly 400 hairpin turns. That is not an exaggeration — it is genuinely 400. The tarmac clings to the cliff face, dropping away to a gorge on one side, with waterfalls cascading across the road in places. Plan on 90 minutes for a 37 km drive. The first 30 minutes turn knuckles white; by the end, you stop noticing the drops.
Cilaos sits inside the cirque — an amphitheater of 1,000+ meter cliffs surrounding a small town at 1,200 meters altitude. The air runs noticeably cooler than the coast. The town is quiet, clean, and distinctly French — a boulangerie, a pharmacy, a small square with a church.
A gite runs about 40 EUR/night with dinner. Rooms are basic: single bed, shared bathroom, mountain views. Dinner is cari poulet — chicken curry with rice, lentils, rougail, and a carafe of local wine. It is excellent. The Cilaos lentils carry a protected geographic indication, like champagne, and they earn it — small, firm, and nutty.
Highlight: The drive itself. Terrifying and spectacular.
Lowlight: Expect your ears to pop four times on the ascent.
Day 2 — Piton des Neiges Summit: Reunion's Highest Point
Alarm: 1:30 AM. Yes — 1:30 in the morning.
The summit hike to Piton des Neiges (3,070 m) starts from Cilaos and takes 7-8 hours round trip. Most hikers set off at 2-3 AM to reach the top for sunrise, and however unenthusiastic that sounds at the trailhead, it is the right call.
Lace up your boots, switch on a headlamp, and follow the trail markers into the darkness. The first two hours are steep switchbacks through cloud forest. At 2,400 m, the vegetation thins. At 2,800 m, you climb above the clouds. The stars up here are extraordinary.
Sunrise at 3,070 meters runs from black to deep blue to orange to gold. Below, all three cirques — Cilaos, Mafate, Salazie — spread out in a 360-degree panorama, their floors hidden by clouds that slowly burn off as the sun climbs. The Indian Ocean glints to the east. Piton de la Fournaise smokes gently to the south.
Stand at the highest point in the Indian Ocean and watch the world light up. Your legs will be screaming. You will not care.
Descend by noon, then spend the afternoon at the thermal baths in Cilaos (10 EUR), soaking the day out of your muscles.
Highlight: The sunrise. No description does it justice.
Lowlight: Your quads will stage a formal protest that lasts three days.
Day 3 — Into Mafate: The Cirque Without Roads
Drive to the Col des Boeufs trailhead (1,940 m) above Salazie, then descend into Mafate. The Cirque de Mafate has no roads, no cars, no motorcycle access. The only way in is by foot or helicopter. That isolation is the entire point.
The descent from Col des Boeufs to the ilet (hamlet) of La Nouvelle takes about 2 hours. The trail drops through cloud forest, across a river (wet feet — bring waterproof boots or accept your fate), and into a landscape that looks like a lost world: towering cliffs on all sides, waterfalls threading down the rock faces, tiny clusters of tin-roofed houses in the valley below.
La Nouvelle has about 150 residents, a school, a church, and three gites. Book through reunion.fr well in advance — gites in Mafate fill up months ahead for peak season. Dinner is rougail saucisse with rice, cooked by the gite owner on a gas stove powered by a solar-charged battery. The electricity goes off at 9 PM.
Step outside after dinner. The Milky Way over Mafate — with zero light pollution and zero ambient noise — ranks among the darkest, most brilliant skies anywhere outside the Namib Desert.
Highlight: Arriving in La Nouvelle and realizing you are genuinely off-grid.
Lowlight: The descent is steep and exposed. If you have knee problems, bring poles.
Day 4 — Mafate Traverse: La Nouvelle to Marla
The GR R2 trail connects the ilets of Mafate. Today's section — La Nouvelle to Marla — runs about 5 hours of undulating trail with views that will have you stopping every ten minutes.
The scale of Mafate from inside is disorienting. The cliff walls rise 800-1,000 meters on all sides. Waterfalls appear and disappear as clouds move through the cirque. The trail passes through agricultural terraces where residents grow chayote, corn, and lentils — everything else arrives by helicopter.
Marla sits slightly larger than La Nouvelle, with a few shops and a post office. The gite here serves cari bichiques — a rare freshwater fish found only in Reunion's rivers, caught during their annual migration. It is a delicacy that runs 30+ EUR in restaurants but comes included in the 45 EUR gite dinner. Tiny, bone-riddled, and delicious.
Highlight: The trail between ilets — genuinely world-class hiking.
Lowlight: The heat. Mafate's lower sections can hit 30°C by midday. Start early.
Day 5 — Piton de la Fournaise: The Moonscape
Drive from the coast to Pas de Bellecombe (2,350 m). The road through the Plaine des Sables is 30 minutes through a landscape that looks like Mars — red and black volcanic gravel, no vegetation, no buildings, nothing. Tell someone this was Iceland and they would believe you.
The hike from Pas de Bellecombe to the crater rim of Piton de la Fournaise takes 2.5 hours each way. The trail descends into the caldera (Enclos Fouque), crosses a flat plain of lava flows of various ages (some from 2018, some from decades earlier), and climbs to the Cratere Dolomieu rim.
The crater is massive — 1 km across, 350 meters deep. The walls run vertical, striped with red, yellow, and black mineral deposits. Steam vents hiss from cracks in the rock. Check the observatory site for the latest eruption activity, and standing on the rim, looking down into the earth, you feel the geological reality: this island is a temporary structure built by liquid rock.
The Plaine des Sables on the way back, lit by late afternoon sun, turns from Mars to the Moon — silver and shadow.
Highlight: The crater rim. The scale. The heat rising from the rock.
Lowlight: The wind at the summit is brutal. Bring a windproof layer.
Day 6 — Salazie, Hell-Bourg, and the Vanilla Coast
Save the last day for the Cirque de Salazie — the lushest of the three, with waterfalls at every turn. The town of Hell-Bourg (named after a former governor, not the underworld) is a Creole heritage village with restored colonial houses, flower gardens, and a Sunday-market feel even on a Thursday.
In the afternoon, visit a vanilla plantation in Sainte-Suzanne on the northeast coast. Reunion produces some of the world's finest Bourbon vanilla. The guides explain the hand-pollination process — vanilla orchids have no natural pollinator on Reunion, so every flower is pollinated by hand with a thin stick — and the 9-month curing process that turns green pods into the aromatic brown ones.
A tube of 5 vanilla pods runs 12 EUR. The same quantity at home would cost 30-40 EUR. Add a bottle of rhum arrange a la vanille (rum infused with vanilla) for 15 EUR. Best souvenir of the trip.
Would You Go Back?
You will start planning your return immediately. The full GR R1 (cirques circuit, 5-7 days) waits, along with the odds of catching an eruption at Piton de la Fournaise (good ones — it erupts nearly every year), the west coast lagoons to explore, and more rougail saucisse to eat.
Reunion is the most underrated hiking destination going. The trail infrastructure is French-standard excellent. The cirques are as dramatic as any landscape in Europe. The food is extraordinary. And the volcano adds a dimension that even the Alps can't match.
Budget around 80 EUR/day: car rental (32), gites (40-45), food at gites and local restaurants (15-20), and fuel (5-10). Not cheap, but for French-quality hiking in an Indian Ocean volcano setting, it is fair.
Pack hiking boots, warm layers (mountain temperatures drop to 5-10°C), rain gear (showers come fast in the cirques), sunscreen (UV is intense at altitude), and a headlamp for those pre-dawn summit starts.
