Highlights

La Réunion – a vacation paradise east of Madagascar. The spectacular Tamarins Route is being built to prevent impending gridlock.

Text: Adele Schonhardt, Photos: Fritz Stark

Just off the plane and already stuck in a traffic jam: for many tourists, their dream vacation on the tropical volcano island of La Réunion begins with workday-like stress. Long before they can unpack their sun-cream on the beach at Boucan Canot, they have to fight their way through the traffic chaos on the west coast of the island.

Stop-and-go with serious economic consequences: La Réunion, French overseas département and the southernmost point in the European Union, lives from tourism. A paradise for hikers, surfers and adventurers, the mountainous island attracts more than 400,000 vacationers each year – of which more than three quarters come from the ‘metropolis’, as the inhabitants call France, the mother country. Visitors have a hard time in the traffic: there are over 300,000 cars for barely 777,000 inhabitants. Parked bumper to bumper, the cars would stretch out over 112 kilometers, thus covering half of the circumference of the island. Nearly 40% of the inhabitants live on the west coast and rely on the fully overloaded National Road Number 1. The important rum and raw sugar industries suffer from the poor traffic infrastructure. And the situation is getting worse: the population is set to jump 20% by 2015, exceeding the 1-million inhabitant mark. With the existing road network that would mean absolute gridlock.