You are in: Europe -> France -> Pitons, cirques and ... , and traditional search or Image Gallery will yield results of this site only
Pitons, cirques and remparts of Reunion Island
Site number:
1317
Type of site: Natural
Date: -
Date of Inscription: 2010
Location: Europe, France, Reunion Island
Image Gallery
Up to 75 images are shown here. Click on each for more details or on Image Gallery for more images.
Description: The Pitons, cirques and remparts of Reunion Island cover 40% of the island (more than 100,000 ha), and are located in the core zone of La Réunion National Park, in the southwest Indian Ocean. Two towering volcanic peaks, massive walls and three cliff-rimmed cirques overlook a striking landscape of rugged terrain and impressive escarpments, forested gorges and basins which house and wide and endemic diversity of plants. Ecosystems and landscape features include subtropical rainforest, cloud forests and heaths. --WHMNet paraphrase from the description at WHC Site, where additional information is available.
  Réunion (French: La Réunion, IPA: [la ʁeynjɔ̃] ( listen); previously Île Bourbon) is a French island of about 800,000 population located in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar, about 200 kilometres (120 mi) south west of Mauritius, the nearest island. Since August 2010, the Pitons, Cirques and Remparts of the island, covering more than 40% of its territory, feature on UNESCO's World Heritage List. Administratively, Réunion is one of the overseas départements of France. Like the other overseas departments, Réunion is also one of the 26 regions of France (being an overseas region) and an integral part of the Republic with the same status as those situated on the European mainland. Réunion is an outermost region of the European Union and, as an overseas department of France, is part of the Eurozone. Due to its location in a time zone to the east of Europe, Réunion was the first region. e island is 63 kilometres (39 mi) long; 45 kilometres (28 mi) wide; and covers 2,512 square kilometres (970 sq mi). It is similar to the island Hawaii insofar as both are located above hotspots in the Earth's crust. The Piton de la Fournaise, a shield volcano on the eastern end of Réunion Island, rises more than 2,631 metres (8,632 ft) above sea level and is sometimes called a sister to Hawaiian volcanoes because of the similarity of climate and volcanic nature. It has erupted more than 100 times since 1640 and is under constant monitoring. It most recently erupted on 2 January 2010. Before that, the most noticeable was during April 2007, when the lava flow was estimated at 3,000,000 cubic metres (3,900,000 cu yd) per day. The Piton de la Fournaise is created by a hotspot volcano, which also created the Piton des Neiges and the islands of Mauritius and Rodrigues. --Wikipedia. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License.
Source: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1317
Reference: 1. UNESCO World Heritage Center (http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1317). 2. Wikipedia.
 
World Map