Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanical Garden

Famous for its long pond of giant water lilies (Victoria amazonica), the garden, first constructed by Pierre Poivre (1719 – 1786) in 1770, covers an area of around 37 hectares (91 acres).

In addition to its giant waterlilies, the garden also features spices, ebonies, sugar canes, and 85 varieties of palms from Central America, Asia, Africa and the islands around the Indian Ocean.

Many trees have been planted by world leaders and royalty, including Princess Margaret, Countess of Snowdon, Indira Gandhi, François Mitterrand and Robert Mugabe.

[4] The gardens, which now cover an area of about 25,110 hectares (62,040 acres), were set aside on 8 June 1729 for colonist P. Barmont 'barmond', who sold it on 3 January 1735 to Claude N. de Maupin, an overseer in the royal French East India Company.

In 1735, Labourdonnais bought the property Château Mon Plaisir and created a vegetable garden to provide produce for his household, the young township of Port Louis, and the ships landing on the island.

In 1739, the French East India Company took possession of Mon Plaisir and almost the entire estate was planted with mulberry trees in the hope of establishing a silkworm industry.

Later, Jean Baptiste Christophore Fusée Aublet, a horticulturist, was sent to establish a drug house and to create a botanical garden; he lived first at Mon Plaisir but was unhappy and transferred all his plant collections to Réduit.

It is thanks to Poivre and his successor Nicolas Céré, who devoted his life and most of his personal fortune to create the gardens, that Pamplemousses became well known to leading naturalists and acquired the worldwide fame it has since retained.

By the middle of the last century, the sugar industry had been fast developing, and the gardens provided a suitable site for the introduction of new cane varieties from other parts of the world.

When the malaria epidemic struck Mauritius in 1866, much of the gardens were used as a nursery for the production of thousands of Eucalyptus tereticornis trees which were introduced in an attempt to control the disease by drying out the marshes of the country, the breeding places of mosquitoes.

[8] Following the death of Anerood Jugnauth in June 2021 part of the garden became a crematorium as the former president and former prime minister became the second person to be cremated within its grounds.

[9] A walk through the garden will make you witness some of the most prized aquatic plants like the giant water lily (Victoria amazonica), the sacred Indian lotus (Nelumbo nucifera) and the different Nymphaea sp.

It was created in 1995 with the collaboration of the Chinese Agricultural and Technical Team (CATT) at the corner of the Shrimati Indhira Gandhi Avenue and the one that leads to the Old Sugar Mill Model.