The village began with hot water. Europeans recorded the discovery of a thermal spring near the future Hell-Bourg around 1830 and set about building a spa around it. But the spring was no secret. It had long been known to the local people and to enslaved Africans and Malagasy on the island, who used its waters to ease their ailments. One colonial administrator fretted, in the cold language of the era, that it would be hard to turn the place into a respectable spa while enslaved people suffering from leprosy and ulcers were bathing in it - a remark that reveals, in passing, both the casual cruelty of the time and the simple human fact that the sick and the enslaved had found relief here first. The official version of Hell-Bourg's history begins with its European 'discovery,' but the water had been healing people long before anyone thought to build a casino beside it.

Once the colonial authorities committed, the village rose quickly. A hotel was ordered in 1839, a military hospital tied to the spring was finished in 1857, and in 1852 a company was formed to build the thermal establishment proper, complete with a casino and a director's house. A carriage road finally reached the remote village in 1890. By then Hell-Bourg's baths were famous across the southern hemisphere. Wealthy vanilla planters from Réunion's east came to take the waters, and so did travelers from South Africa, Kenya, and Mozambique, drawn by spas marketed as a cure for the fevers that plagued Europeans in the tropics.

The good times did not last. In 1948, a cyclone-driven landslide buried the spring for good, and without its waters the village lost the very thing that had built it. The grand thermal establishment fell silent, and the jungle began to reclaim the old spa - whose overgrown ruins still stand at the edge of the village, slowly dissolving into the green. Hell-Bourg might have faded entirely. Instead, cut off and left behind, it simply stopped changing - and that accidental preservation became its salvation.

In 1999, Hell-Bourg was admitted to Les Plus Beaux Villages de France, the association of France's most striking small communities - and it remains the only village in Réunion, and the only one in all of overseas France, to hold the label. To keep it, the village hides its modern fittings: there are almost no visible telephone or power poles among the brightly painted nineteenth-century Creole houses. Today it lives on hiking and heritage. Trails climb from here to the Piton d'Anchaing in the heart of the cirque and onward to Piton des Neiges, and visitors wander a famously colorful cemetery and small museum. The chou chou vine - the chayote squash - climbs over fences and gardens, a quiet green emblem of a village that turned being forgotten into being treasured.