Black River Gorges National Park is where the rarest bird on Earth made its stand. By 1974 just four Mauritius kestrels were known to be alive, the last of them hunting over these forested ravines, and the biologists Carl Jones and Wahab Owadally rebuilt the species from that handful; around 400 now fly wild, and in 2022 the kestrel was made the national bird of Mauritius. The park was proclaimed in 1994 for the same reason the kestrel almost vanished: ebony logging and then sugar cane stripped Mauritius of nearly all its native forest, and most of what escaped survives here, on slopes too steep and too wet to be worth clearing. It is the island's largest protected area, holding more than 300 flowering plant species and nine birds found nowhere else — among them the pink pigeon, down to about ten survivors in 1991 and back above 400, and the echo parakeet, once the rarest parrot in the world.
Sixty kilometres of trail run through the park, but its two great views cost only a short walk from the road: the rim viewpoints, where ravine after forested ravine folds away toward the coast, and the falls dropping off the plateau edge — thin threads in the dry winter, full white curtains after the summer rains. Below the rim the air turns close and dripping, and the ripping screech of an echo parakeet carries further than you can see. This forest is contested ground: Chinese guava, brought in as a garden fruit, has smothered whole hillsides, and rangers cut it out by hand inside fenced enclosures. Yet every autumn, from April, Mauritian families drive up to Plaine Champagne with buckets to pick that same guava. The park's worst weed is the island's best-loved fruit, and here you are welcome to take it.