Categories: Travel

SEVEN COLOURS ON CHAMAREL

Mauritius is one of the world’s top luxury tourism destinations. Tourist can enjoy its tropical climate with clear warm sea waters and attractive beaches.
If you would like to dicover more than these, you should surely visit Chamarel plain of the Rivière Noire District in south-western Mauritius called Seven Coloured Earths. This relatively small area of strikingly bare landscape is located within a large, dense forest and the earth is particularly unusual there. Sand dunes have seven distinct colours there: red, brown, violet, green, blue, purple and yellow. After having closer look you will realize that seven colors are very real. They say that sunrise is the best time to see them. But this unusual coloring is not the only bizarre trait of this place.
The main feature of the place is that since these differently coloured sands spontaneously settle in different layers, dunes acquire a surrealistic, striped colouring. This phenomenon can also be observed, on a smaller scale, if one takes a handful of sands of different colours and mixes them together, as they’ll eventually separate into a layered spectrum.

Another interesting feature of Chamarel’s Coloured Earths is that the dunes seemingly never erode, in spite of Mauritius’ torrential, tropical rains. The sands have formed from the decomposition of volcanic rock, gullies into clay. Further they transformed into ferralitic soil by total hydrolysis; the two main elements of the resulting soil, iron and aluminium, are responsible for red/anthracite and blue/purplish colours respectively. The different shades of colour are believed to be a consequence of the molten volcanic rock cooling down at different external temperatures, but the causes of their consistent spontaneous separation are yet to be fully clarified.