Reunion (Reunion in Creole) is a southwestern island of the Indian Ocean in the southern hemisphere, now a department and a region French Overseas (French overseas departments). It is located in the Mascarene archipelago about 700 km east of Madagascar and 170 km southwest of Mauritius, the nearest land.
Enjoying a tropical climate and situated on the route of cyclones, it presents a steep relief worked by a very marked erosion. It culminates at 3071 meters altitude at the summit of Piton des Neiges and also houses one of the most active volcanoes in the world: the Piton de la Fournaise. This increases the surface area episodically this territory approximately 200 km in circumference, which enjoys its current 2512 square kilometers of exceptional endemism.
Presumably spotted by the Arabs in the Middle Ages, Reunion has been inhabited that as of mid-seventeenth century, about 150 years after its appearance on portolans Portuguese navigators. Previously known as the Mascareigne, it becomes that of Bourbon in a stop of the French East India Company of India on the road and, from the 1710s, a veritable colony practicing coffee culture. Become a plantation society, it then passes under the direct control of the king of France in the 1760s before being reassigned to the sugar cane industry after the Napoleonic Wars. It is definitely renamed to its current name and slavery is abolished in 18482. Despite the indenture, which is practiced until the 1930s, it follows a creeping economic crisis which will put an end only Following its transformation into French department in 1946.
The meeting has since been a department overseas (department code "974"), which has also become an outermost region of the European Union. Nevertheless, and despite its membership in the euro area, its productive fabric remains structurally fragile and highly dependent on metropolitan France. There are notes a particularly high unemployment rate of around 29%, including 60% among young people3. At the last census in force, the 2012, the population is 833,944 habitants4. Réunionnais focus on the coasts, where space and housing are lacking and where is Saint-Denis, the capital. GDP is estimated at € 14.5 billion.
The local population is characterized by the youth of the inhabitants and their different origins, both European, West African, East African, Malagasy, Indian, Annamite, Malay and Chinese. Cohabitation in a small space has led to unprecedented mixtures, forming the Reunion Creole languages, their religions meeting around an original syncretism, all feeding their cuisines Reunion kitchen and merging their music to give Sega and Maloya . This original interbreeding is considered an essential asset for the first economic sector of the island, the local tourism industry, to which it owes its nickname of intense Island.