Travel Guide Pamplemousses
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The history of this small town located 11 km north-east of Port-Louis and 15 km south of Grand Bay is closely linked to Bertrand-François Mahé de La Bourdonnais, governor of the island of France from 1735 to 1746. When the great man arrived, Pamplemousses was only a hamlet surrounded by farms. The governor, who had decided to make Port Nord-Ouest (= Port-Louis) the new capital of the island, had to settle nearby. He therefore acquired the property of Mon Plaisir on the site of the present botanical garden, where he had his residence built. There, Mahé de La Bourdonnais encouraged the development of metallurgical activities, with the construction, in 1742, of a saltpetre refinery and a powder mill. He also built the first blast furnaces on the island (the forges of Mont Désir) in the township of Pamplemousses, at Baie aux Tortues, and developed the Villebague sugar factory, of which he was a shareholder and which could have been the first in operation if the mills intended for it had not ended up at the bottom of the water with the Saint-Géran in August 1744... before being recovered. It is thus the Ferney sugar factory, in the South, which produced the first sugar of the time. Of all this, history has only preserved the vegetable garden of Mahé de La Bourdonnais, which, under the impetus of the botanist Pierre Poivre and his successors, was to become the famous Botanical Garden of Pamplemousses, one of the most beautiful in the world, a heritage of the island and a place of stroll and discovery for vacationers as well as for Mauritians
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