Mauritius

Mauritius enters its second post-independence century at a paradox. The island closed 2025 with a record 1.44 million tourist arrivals and tourism earnings comfortably above Rs 100 billion, yet the same year saw roughly 80 percent of its corals bleached and an estimated 37 kilometres of its 322-kilometre coastline visibly retreating. The two facts are not separable. The beach-and-reef formula that built a luxury hospitality industry of 110 operating hotels, more than 14,000 rooms, and a Vision 2030 ambition of two million annual arrivals is the same formula that warming seas, intensifying cyclones, and a coastal-erosion line advancing in some places at close to a metre a year are quietly undoing. The question is not whether Mauritius's tourism will look different in 2100, but how comprehensively it will have been rebuilt, and around what.

The physical signal is clear. The western tropical Indian Ocean has warmed faster than any other region of the tropical oceans for more than a century, and sea-surface temperatures around Mauritius are projected to rise another two to three degrees above pre-industrial levels by the end of this century on a middle-of-the-road emissions pathway. Relative sea level at the Port Louis tide gauge has been rising at roughly twice the global mean, and central projections put it some 0.56 metres higher by 2100 than at the turn of the millennium, with Rodrigues — flatter, drier, more exposed — running closer to nine millimetres a year. Peer-reviewed work on Western Indian Ocean reefs suggests they face serious risk of becoming functionally extinct by the 2070s under continuing warming, and the 2024 bleaching event already prompted the introduction of new bleaching-alert categories because the existing scale could no longer capture what was happening. The most exposed reefs — Belle Mare, Flic en Flac, Île aux Bénitiers — bleached at well above 65 percent that year, while cooler refugia at Blue Bay, Bel Ombre, and Mont Choisy fared markedly better. By 2100 those refugia matter enormously, because they are where assisted-evolution coral gardens, cultivated from heat-tolerant genotypes, will anchor whatever reef experience the premium resorts can still afford to maintain.

The cyclone signal is more nuanced than the headlines. The southwest Indian Ocean is not expected to see a robust increase in overall storm counts, and may see slightly fewer events, but the proportion of category 4 and 5 storms is rising and so are rainfall rates within them. For Mauritius, the difference between a typical season and a single Belal-class event — which inundated central Port Louis in January 2024 and affected more than 100,000 people — is already measured in the order of US$100 million in annual damage. By 2100 the resort estates of the east and west coasts will have been rebuilt at least once around that expectation. Engineered shorelines, submerged geotextile breakwaters, mangrove restoration buffers and rolling sand nourishment programmes will be the unglamorous backbone of the beach-tourism product. The Rs 3.2 billion already committed to rehabilitating roughly 26 kilometres of shoreline is a down-payment on a century-long obligation.

This is why the most interesting story of Mauritian tourism in 2100 lies inland and upland. Black River Gorges National Park, the renamed and enlarged Black River Gorges–Bel Ombre Biosphere Reserve, and the chain of offshore islet reserves are cooler, less cyclone-exposed, and rich in a recovery story almost without parallel in the tropics. The Mauritius kestrel, brought back from four known birds in 1974 to a population in the hundreds; the pink pigeon, recovered from single digits in 1990 to roughly 600 wild birds; the echo parakeet, lifted from around a dozen survivors in the 1970s to close to 800 — these are the durable assets of a different kind of destination. Endemic-species walking products, dodo-era interpretive experiences anchored by the country's museums, and the deeper cultural portfolio organised around Aapravasi Ghat and the Le Morne Cultural Landscape will increasingly carry the brand. Le Morne in particular is well placed to be rebranded as a landscape of resistance, with augmented-reality interpretation of the maroon-descended communities who survived enslavement on its slopes and whose descendants still live at its foot.

Cultural assets are the most underrated leg of this transition. Mauritius holds four UNESCO inscriptions of intangible cultural heritage — Sega Tipik, Bhojpuri Geet-Gawai, Sega Tambour Rodrigues, and Sega Tambour Chagos — sustained by living transmission networks across Creole, Bhojpuri, Tamil, French, and Sino-Mauritian communities. Living heritage of this kind is portable, hard to automate, and a natural counterweight to the homogenising pull of algorithmic recommendation systems. It will also be central to Rodrigues, which by 2100 is plausibly a deliberately smaller, more cohesive ecotourism destination of around 50,000 residents, with community-managed marine reserves, fruit-bat trails, Rodrigues Fody walks, and a Sega Tambour-anchored cultural offer.

Two structural shifts complete the picture. The first is demographic. Mauritian fertility has fallen to roughly 1.2, the median age is already above 38, and central United Nations projections see the population shrinking from 1.27 million today to a little over half that figure by 2100, with the median age climbing into the mid-fifties. The labour force that built the integrated-resort model will not exist at that scale; what replaces it is a smaller, more skilled, multilingual workforce operating alongside very capable artificial intelligence. Mauritius is unusually well placed for this transition, ranking first in Sub-Saharan Africa on the leading government AI-readiness benchmark, with an ICT sector already contributing close to six percent of GDP. By mid-century, AI will be doing much of the booking, concierge, language interpretation, dynamic pricing, reef monitoring, and crowd-management work, while humans concentrate on cultural interpretation, marine-restoration craftsmanship, longevity and medical wellness, and the high-touch experiences that justify a premium price.

The second shift is geopolitical and distributive. The 2025 treaty restoring sovereignty over the Chagos Archipelago to Mauritius, signed in May of that year and still awaiting ratification, holds Diego Garcia under a planned 99-year lease that, even on optimistic timelines, would still be running in 2100. Tourism on Diego Garcia is therefore not a credible prospect within that horizon; what is plausible is small-scale scientific and heritage tourism on the outer atolls of Peros Banhos and the Salomon Islands, where some of the most pristine reefs left in the basin may serve as a regional genetic reference for coral restoration elsewhere. Closer to home, the question of who actually owns coastal Mauritius will dominate the politics of tourism. The doubling of registration and transfer duties on foreign property purchases from July 2026 is a first response to the friction between expanding residential-tourism schemes — the Property Development Scheme, the Smart City Scheme, the Premium Visa — and a population that increasingly experiences its own coast as a place from which it is being priced out. Whether the long leases written into those schemes harden into permanent foreign enclaves or are gradually re-absorbed into local ownership is among the most consequential questions the country faces.

The likely 2100 tourism economy is therefore smaller in headcount, higher in value, less concentrated on the beach, more concentrated in the highlands and in heritage, and quietly mediated by AI at almost every operational layer. The lagoon experience survives, but with a memory-tourism overlay in which virtual reconstructions of the reefs of the 2020s are narrated alongside the engineered ones of the 2090s. The beach survives where the sand is paid for. The kestrels and the pink pigeons, the indenture archives at Aapravasi Ghat, the maroon landscape at Le Morne, the Sega Tambour drum circles in Rodrigues, and the Geet-Gawai weddings in Bhojpuri-speaking villages — these are the experiences the next century is most likely to deliver intact, and they are the ones most worth investing in now.