Eureka House, Moka

A Creole mansion ten minutes from the trail

Eureka stands on Mount Ory Road in Moka, below Montagne Ory and on the road most drivers take from the motorway to the B47, so many people heading for the Petit Verger car park pass its gate without knowing. It is about 3.3 km from the car park in a straight line and roughly ten minutes by car, which makes it the natural second stop of a Le Pouce morning, either for a late breakfast after a dawn climb or for shade in the early afternoon.

The house is entirely made of wood, a long, low Creole mansion dated 1830. The count that everyone remembers is 109 doors and windows for 40 rooms, and the structural beams include tambalacoque, a hard native timber whose tree is now rare. Two verandas face different ways, one north for winter and one south for summer, and the kitchen stands apart from the house to keep fire away from the timber.

Who built it and who lived here

The accounts of the early owners are family tradition rather than archive, and they do not all agree, so this page keeps to what the two main published accounts share. The house is attributed to a Mr Carr, a British notable who wanted to live near Le Réduit, where the governor lived. The land had earlier passed through a Frenchman named Montmirail, who had left France at the Revolution in 1793 and from whose time the separate kitchen is said to date, and in 1812 the property was bought by a Mr and Mrs Robinson.

In 1856 Eugène Leclézio, a lawyer whose father had been a shipowner from Lorient, bought the estate from the Robinsons, and the Leclézio family kept it for well over a century. Sir Eugène and Sir Henry Leclézio both lived here, Simone Leclézio inherited it and died in 1980, and in 1985 Fernand Leclézio sold the property. It then passed to Jacques de Maroussem and his family, who opened it to the public as a museum in 1986. The name is shared with the novelist J.M.G. Le Clézio, whose Mauritian family this is and whom the house’s own literature links to the estate.

What 109 doors and windows are for

The number is not decoration. A wooden house on the plateau at about 200 m has to breathe through the hot, wet summer and close up against cyclones, and the long rows of shuttered doors and windows let the family open the whole house to the breeze in the morning and shut it against an afternoon downpour. The twin verandas work the same way, one used in winter and one in summer, and the detached kitchen protected the timber house from the biggest everyday risk, which was fire.

Walk round the outside before you go in. The roof, the verandas and the spacing of the openings tell you more about the climate than any label, and from the garden the slopes of Montagne Ory close the view, with the ridge of the Moka Range beyond.

What the rooms say about plantation-era life

Inside, the rooms are furnished as a prosperous sugar family would have known them, with fine furniture and eighteenth-century porcelain from the Compagnie des Indes, and a table the house says was taken from a captured English vessel. The point is less the objects than the scale, forty rooms for one family, a kitchen staffed and kept at a distance, and an estate that grew spices and sugar cane for export.

The house was built a few years before the first indentured labourers landed at Port Louis in 1834, and it prospered through the sugar boom that followed. Darwin, who climbed Le Pouce in early May 1836 and looked down on this side of the island, wrote that the country appeared well cultivated, divided into fields and studded with farmhouses, and that sugar exports were said to have grown seventy-five fold in the twenty-five years since the British took the island. Eureka is one of those farmhouses, and the fields he saw were cane like the fields that still surround the trailhead.

The gardens and the waterfalls

The garden is large and informal, with mango, almond, palm, mulberry and longan trees, cinnamon and other spice trees and a scattering of endemic plants, and the Moka river runs through the estate with small waterfalls. Along the banks you find water lilies, ferns, water hyacinth and taro, and the estate offers walks along the ravine. The falls lie a few hundred metres from the house down a path that is steep in places and slippery after rain, so wear the shoes you hiked in.

In general terms, expect a pleasant half hour rather than a spectacle. The river is modest, the falls are small, and the attraction is the shade and the sound of water after a hot mountain. Stay off the rocks when they are wet, and keep children close on the ravine path.

Visiting Eureka with the hike

The simplest plan is to climb at first light, be back at the car by mid-morning and drive the ten minutes to Eureka for the late morning, when the house is cool and the garden still has shade. Meals and tea have traditionally been served on the veranda, so lunch here is possible, but confirm the current arrangements before relying on it. Opening days, hours and admission prices are deliberately not given on this page because they change; check them directly with the house before you set out, and do the same on public holidays.

Without a car, buses between Port Louis and Moka pass through the village; ask for the stop nearest Eureka and expect a short walk. From Saint-Pierre the house is further than it looks, about 4 km in a straight line, so a taxi is the realistic link between the trailhead and the house if you came by bus.

• Allow about an hour for the house and a further half hour for the garden and the falls.
• Wear shoes with grip for the ravine path and take a hat for the open garden.
• Photography rules inside are the house’s to set, so ask before you shoot.
• Combine the visit with the gates of Le Réduit and the university quarter, both a few minutes away, for a full afternoon.