Le Morne Brabant
— — the mountain that became a refuge.
Not only on a wall.
“A basalt monolith rising 556 metres straight out of the Indian Ocean on the southwest tip of Mauritius. Through the early nineteenth century, escaped slaves climbed its near-vertical flanks and lived in caves at the summit. A local oral tradition holds that in 1835, when soldiers approached to announce abolition, the maroons mistook them for a slave-catching party and jumped. UNESCO inscribed the mountain in 2008 as a cultural landscape of resistance.
Le Morne Brabant, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Le Morne Brabant is a basaltic monolith on a small peninsula at the southwest corner of Mauritius, rising to 556 metres above the Indian Ocean. The mountain and its surrounding lagoon were inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2008 as a Cultural Landscape, recognising its role as a refuge for runaway slaves — known locally as marrons — through the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The summit plateau is reached by a single steep trail rising about 450 metres from the saddle, restricted by guided access on the upper section.
From above the peninsula, a long sand channel runoff across the reef creates the optical illusion known as the underwater waterfall — silt and sand carried off the shelf appear, from altitude, to plunge into a deep blue trench. The mountain anchors one end of Mauritius's largest fringing lagoon, with reef breaks at One Eye and Manawa that draw kitesurfers between May and October, when the southeast trade winds blow steadily across the bay at 15 to 25 knots.
Every February first the villages at the foot of the mountain hold the Festival International Kreol commemorations and the abolition anniversary, with sega tambour and a procession to the memorial at the base of the cliff. Outside that week, the lagoon side stays quiet — a handful of resorts on the north flank, a fishing landing at the village of Le Morne, and the long unpopulated stretch of the public beach. The peninsula sits roughly 65 kilometres south of Port Louis by road.