Natural History Museum Port Louis

The Mauritius Institute museum on the Place d'Armes holds the island's natural history collection in a building dating from the 1880s, and its central exhibit is a dodo: a composite skeleton assembled from bones recovered at the Mare aux Songes swamp, displayed alongside a model reconstruction of the bird. Mauritius was the only place the dodo ever lived, and it was gone within a century of Dutch settlement, so the skeleton carries weight beyond its size. The rest of the collection covers the island's extinct and surviving fauna, including the solitaire of Rodrigues, marine specimens, corals and birds, in old wooden cases that have changed little in decades. Entry is free and the visit takes about an hour.

What you actually see

• The dodo skeleton - the composite reconstruction from Mare aux Songes bones.
• Extinct island species - the solitaire and other lost fauna of the Mascarenes.
• Marine collections - corals, shells and fish of the surrounding reefs.
• The old display cases - the nineteenth-century museum fittings themselves.

When to go

Year round; it is indoors and free. It closes on Sundays and public holidays and has restricted Saturday hours. Weekday mornings are quietest.

Honest expectations

The museum is small, old-fashioned and lightly interpreted, with faded labels in places. The dodo is a mounted composite rather than a single complete individual. Some galleries close without notice. It takes an hour at most.

Nearby

The central market and Chinatown lie north; the Caudan waterfront is west.