Constance Belle Mare Plage

We recommend Constance Belle Mare Plage to families who want a true resort with complete infrastructure, and to golfing couples looking for a beach-course stay without leaving the hotel. It is an address for those who love wide open spaces, days paced between sport and idleness, without the confined atmosphere of intimate boutique hotels. Groups of friends in their thirties and forties find their account thanks to the variety of activities and restaurants.

The resort extends over 15 hectares of tropical gardens planted with casuarinas, palms and bougainvilleas, with low buildings in Mauritian colonial style arranged in villages. Discreet architecture in local lava stone and thatched roofs, white facades with green shutters, covered wooden galleries. The rooms occupy pavilions of two storeys maximum, linked by paved paths bordered by dense vegetation. The scale remains human despite the 256 rooms, one never feels the holiday-village effect thanks to the generous spacing of the buildings.

Seven restaurants cover all registers: Blue Penny Cellar for French gastronomy (cellar of 25 000 bottles, one of the best stocked in the Indian Ocean), Deer Hunter for grills and matured meats, Lakaze for authentic Mauritian cuisine by the beach. Indigo serves fusion Asian cuisine, Blue Penny Café offers buffets and à la carte dishes all day. Two bars including Legends Bar at the golf clubhouse. The breakfast buffet at Blue Penny Café remains generous but without surprise, we prefer to order à la carte the eggs Benedict and the Bourbon vanilla pancakes.

The hotel stands at Pointe de Flacq on the east coast of Mauritius, 45 minutes from Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam international airport and 1h15 from Port-Louis the capital. The Belle Mare area concentrates several high-end resorts along one of the island's finest beaches, protected by the coral reef that calms the waves. The village of Flacq ten minutes away offers an authentic local market on Wednesday and Sunday, a few shops and Creole restaurants. The east coast remains wilder and windier than the west, ideal for kitesurfing and windsurfing, less so for young children's bathing at low tide.