National museum
Natural History Museum, Port Louis
Port-Louis · Port Louis
AI-generated imageThe museum occupies the ground floor of the Mauritius Institute, a building raised between 1880 and 1884 and listed as national heritage, directly opposite the Jardin de la Compagnie. It grew out of the Desjardins Museum, opened to the public on 14 October 1842 in a wing of the old Royal College, which makes it the oldest museum in Mauritius. Four permanent galleries tell the last five hundred years of Mauritian nature: mammals, reptiles and birds; marine life; geology, insects and island timbers; and lastly the dodo.
At a glance
- Opening hours
- Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday 9am to 4pm; Wednesday 11am to 4pm; Saturday 9am to noon
- Closed
- Sundays and public holidays
- Telephone
- +230 211 7794
- mimuse@intnet.mu
- Founded
- 1842
What sets it apart
The dodo gallery brings together a model of the bird and a skeleton collected in 1900 by Étienne Thirioux, a barber by trade, in which every bone comes from one individual. It also shows a skeleton of the Rodrigues solitaire, discovered the same year at Caverne Patate. In the marine gallery, a giant clam of about seventy kilos, given to the museum in 1874, sits near a Seychelles land tortoise that reached Mauritius in 1776 and died in 1918.
Highlights
- A dodo skeleton whose bones all come from the same bird
- The skeleton of the Rodrigues solitaire
- A whole gallery devoted to marine life
- An insectarium of butterflies and hawk moths
- Free entry
Good to know
- On Wednesdays the museum opens only at 11am.
- On Saturdays it closes at noon.
- The Jardin de la Compagnie, directly opposite, is the natural way to round off the visit.
Getting there
On the ground floor of the Mauritius Institute, on La Chaussée, in central Port Louis, opposite the Jardin de la Compagnie.
Where to stay
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In the journal