Réunion (; French: [la ʁe.ynjɔ̃] ; Reunionese Creole: La Rényon; known as Île Bourbon before 1848) is an island in the Indian Ocean that is an overseas department and region of France within the African region. Part of the Mascarene Islands, it is located approximately 679 kilometres (367 nautical miles) east of the island of Madagascar and 175 kilometres (94 nmi) southwest of the island of Mauritius. As of January 2026, it had a population of 910,985. Its capital and largest city is Saint-Denis. Before the arrival of French colonial subjects and immigrants in the 17th century, Réunion was an uninhabited island. Its tropical climate led to the development of a plantation economy focused primarily on sugar; slaves from East Africa were imported as fieldworkers, followed by Malays, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Indians as indentured laborers. Today, the greatest proportion of the population is of mixed descent, while the predominant language is Réunion Creole, though French remains the sole official language. Since 1946, Réunion has been governed as a French region and thus has a similar status to its counterparts in Metropolitan France. Consequently, it is one of the outermost regions of the European Union and part of the eurozone; it is, along with the French overseas department of Mayotte, one of the two eurozone areas in the Southern Hemisphere and in Africa. Owing to its strategic location, France maintains a large military presence on the island.
Name The French took possession of the island in the 17th century, naming it Isle Bourbon after the House of Bourbon which then ruled France. To break with this name, which was too attached to the Ancien Régime, the National Convention decided on 23 March 1793 to rename the territory La Réunion ("réunion", in French, usually means "meeting" or "assembly" rather than "reunion"). This name was presumably chosen in homage to the meeting of the fédérés of Marseilles and the Paris National Guards that preceded the insurrection of 10 August 1792. No document establishes this, and the word "meeting" could have been purely symbolic. The island changed its name again in the 19th century: in 1806, under the First Empire, General Charles Decaen named it Isle Bonaparte (after Napoleon), though, in 1810, it became Isle Bourbon again. It was eventually renamed La Réunion after the fall of the July monarchy by a decree of the Provisional Government on 7 March 1848. In accordance with the original spelling and the classical spelling and typographical rules, "la Réunion" was written with a lower case in the article, but during the end of the 20th century the spelling "La Réunion" with a capital letter was developed in many writings to emphasize the integration of the article in the name. This last spelling corresponds to the recommendations of the Commission nationale de toponymie and appears in the current Constitution of the French Republic in Articles 72-3 and 73.
History
The island has been inhabited since the 17th century, when people from France and Madagascar settled there. Slavery was abolished on 20 December 1848 (a date celebrated yearly on the island), when the Second Republic that had been established months earlier by the February Revolution abolished slavery in the French colonies. However, indentured workers continued to be brought to Réunion from South India, among other places. The island became an overseas department of France in 1946.
Early history Not much is known of Réunion's history before the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th century. Arab traders were familiar with it by the name Dina Morgabin, "Western Island" (likely Arabic: دنية مغربي Daniyah/ Maghribīy). The island is possibly featured on a map from 1153 AD by Al Sharif el-Edrisi. The island might also have been visited by Swahili or Austronesian (ancient Indonesian–Malaysian) sailors on their journey to the west from the Malay Archipelago to Madagascar. The first European discovery of the area was made around 1507 by Portuguese explorer Diogo Fernandes Pereira, but the specifics are unclear. The uninhabited island might have been first sighted by the expedition led by Dom Pedro Mascarenhas, who gave his name to the island group around Réunion, the Mascarenes. Réunion itself was dubbed Santa Apolónia after a favourite saint, which suggests that the date of the Portuguese discovery could have been 9 February, her feast day. Diogo Lopes de Sequeira is said to have landed on the islands of Réunion and Rodrigues in 1509.
Isle Bourbon (1642–1793)
By the early 1600s, nominal Portuguese rule had left Santa Apolónia virtually untouched. The island was then occupied by France and administered from Port Louis, Mauritius. Although the first French claims date from 1638, when François Cauche and Salomon Goubert visited in June 1638, the island was officially claimed by Jacques Pronis of France in 1642, when he deported a dozen French mutineers to the island from Madagascar. The convicts were returned to France several years later, and in 1649, the island was named Île Bourbon after the House of Bourbon. Colonisation started in 1665, when the French East India Company sent the first settlers. The French colonists developed a plantation economy founded on the cultivation of coffee and sugar by use of slave labor. From the 17th to the 19th centuries, French colonisation, supplemented by importing Africans, Chinese, and Indians as workers, contributed to ethnic diversity in the population. From 1690, most of the non-Europeans on the island were enslaved. Of the 80,000 slaves imported to Réunion and Mauritius between 1769 and 1793, 45% was provided by slave traders of the Sakalava people in North West Madagascar, who raided East Africa and the Comoros for slaves, and the rest was provided by Arab slave traders who bought slaves from Portuguese Mozambique and transported them to Réunion via Madagascar.
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