Journal

Four traditions on the UNESCO lists, a music culture that fills the highlands and the southwest, and a calendar that mostly is not one.

Rice at every meal, an accompaniment beside it, and a chili paste on the side. What to eat in Madagascar and what the menu is telling you.

The rainforest most visitors to Madagascar actually see, three hours from the capital, and not one of the six components of the Atsinanana inscription.

Limestone needles, canyons and dry forest across western Madagascar, in a serial property that was renamed and greatly extended after inscription.

The upper town of Antananarivo, its royal palace and its nineteenth century streets, on the Tentative List since 2016 and not inscribed.

Six rainforest parks along the eastern escarpment, inscribed in 2007, on the Danger List for fifteen years and removed from it in 2025.

A royal city, a burial ground and a set of sacred places on a hill north of Antananarivo, still visited by pilgrims after five hundred years.

Sixteen hundred square meters of stone steps in Port Louis, where a system that moved half a million people and reshaped the labor of empires began.

Mauritius is warm all year, so the question is not temperature. It is cyclones, humidity and the difference between the coast and the plateau.

The last of the native forest of Mauritius, on 3.5 per cent of the island, holding species that exist nowhere else. On the Tentative List, not inscribed.

A crater lake in the Mauritian highlands, the most important Hindu site on the island and the focus of the largest Hindu pilgrimage outside India.

The basalt mountain at the southwest corner where escaped slaves sheltered, inscribed for what is remembered about it rather than for what is built on it.