Mauritius

Mauritius is a volcanic island in the Indian Ocean ringed by an almost continuous coral barrier, with an interior of plateaus, steep peaks and gorges. Its natural history is one of the most dramatic on the planet: when the Europeans arrived in the sixteenth century, the island was covered in endemic forest and inhabited by a fauna with no fear of human beings, which disappeared within a few decades through hunting and through the rats, pigs and monkeys that were introduced. The dodo, a giant flightless pigeon, became extinct barely a century after its discovery and turned into the universal symbol of extinction. Today fragments of native forest survive in Black River Gorges and on satellite islets that work as arks, where the original vegetation and fauna have been rebuilt step by step.