Public beaches: the shore that belongs to everyone

The right of access to the shore comes up in every travel conversation in Mauritius. The question has a clear answer, contained in one statutory definition and a list of 145 names.

The Beach Authority Act, Act No. 7 of 2002, assented to on 11 April 2002 by President Karl Auguste Offmann, defines a public beach in two parts. It is, first, an area of the coast that the minister responsible for housing and lands has declared a public beach by a notice published in the Government Gazette. It is, second, the area lying between the low-water mark and the high-water mark, together with the surrounding waters up to a distance of one hundred metres.

Two consequences follow from this wording. The first is that a beach is not public because it is beautiful, busy or fringed with filao trees: it is public because a notice has declared it so. The second is that a public beach extends out to sea. The hundred metres of water are part of it, which is no mere technicality when it comes to swimming and boats.

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The Beach Authority and its powers

The same Act creates the Beach Authority and gives it the purpose of ensuring the proper control and management of public beaches in Mauritius and Rodrigues. Its remit covers the conservation and protection of the beach environment, landscaping, amenities and their upkeep, leisure facilities, the improvement of seawater quality and day-to-day management.

It also regulates activities on public beaches and looks after the safety of the people who use them. It issues beach trader licences for sites set aside specifically for the purpose, sets standards and advises the minister. The detailed rules of conduct, for camping, vehicles, trading or alcohol, are laid down by regulation.

One subsection reveals the legislator’s intent: notwithstanding any other enactment, the Authority has access to, and control of, any public beach in the exercise of its functions. It may also delegate the management of a public beach to a person or body, on the prescribed conditions.

As of 18 July 2025, Mauritius had 145 proclaimed beaches, covering some 355.8605 hectares with a sea frontage of around 48,237.33 metres, a little over 48 kilometres of shoreline.

These 145 beaches are divided among four regions: 41 in the north, 44 in the east, 33 in the west and 27 in the south. The four regions are remarkably close in area, between 87.6 and 90.0 hectares each, but not in sea frontage: 15,531 metres in the east, against 10,781 metres in the south.

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A public domain that is still growing

The list of proclaimed beaches can also be read as a chronology. Each beach carries the number of the notice that proclaimed it, and those notices run from 1940 to 2025. Several beaches in the north still owe their status to notice 206 of 1940. Others, in the east and the south, were proclaimed in 2024 and 2025. The public beach domain is therefore no fixed inheritance: it is still growing, one notice at a time.

Two details speak volumes. First, several beaches are identified by their neighbours, such as the stretch of Pointe aux Piments lying between two hotels, or another described by the hotel it is close to. The division of the coast between public domain and leased land can be read in the very names. Second, Von Moltke beach, in the northern region, originally covered 0.6590 hectares, of which 0.058 hectares was deproclaimed by a notice in 1997. A proclamation can be withdrawn, then, and the list keeps a record of it.

On a proclaimed beach, the visitor has as much right to be there as anyone else, on the sand and in the first hundred metres of water alike. They are also under the eye of an authority that regulates activities, licenses traders to designated sites and looks after the safety of beach users.

Beyond these 145 stretches of shore, the question changes in nature. The coast also includes land held on lease, and how far one may walk along a beach in front of a hotel is a matter of land law, not of the list of beaches.

What matters most fits into a single sentence: 145 stretches of the Mauritian coast are declared public, they include the hundred metres of water beyond them, and their number keeps growing.