Grand Baie Beach

Grand Baie is not Mauritius's most beautiful beach in the conventional sense — the bay is busy, the water reflects the activity of the marina, and the sand is narrower than the nearby beaches to the north and south. What Grand Baie has instead is energy: the concentrated vitality of the island's most developed tourist town, which makes it the most socially interesting beach on the north coast and the practical hub for anyone wanting to do more than lie still in the sun.

The bay faces north, which means it catches the afternoon trade wind reliably and the water in front of the main beach has a slight chop through the afternoon hours. The mornings are calmer, and before 10am the water in the bay has a particular glassiness that the active hours of the day will break. The beach promenade — a strip of restaurants, watersports hire huts, boat charter operators, and the terrace bars of several hotels — begins to function properly from around 8am and doesn't entirely stop until midnight.

Grand Baie is the departure point for the majority of the island's catamaran cruises, the most popular tourist activity in Mauritius. The day trips — circumnavigation of the northern islands, snorkelling at the Coin de Mire reef, sunset cocktail cruises — all leave from the Grand Baie boat harbour in the early morning, and the parade of catamarans and motorboats crossing the bay between 8am and 10am is a spectacle in itself. The northern islands visible from the beach — Coin de Mire, Flat Island, Gabriel Island — are accessible for day trips that leave from the harbour, and the snorkelling at Flat Island in particular is considered exceptional.

The town of Grand Baie itself extends behind the beach and is worth exploring for its restaurants (the range is the widest on the island outside Port Louis), shops, and the evening social scene that makes the northern coast feel more like a destination than simply a place to stay.