In November 1663, two Frenchmen named Louis Payen and Pierre Pau stepped ashore on the western coast of an uninhabited volcanic island then called Bourbon. They did not come alone. With them arrived ten Malagasy servants - in truth, the island's first enslaved people, brought from nearby Madagascar to clear and work a land that had no human history at all. Slavery would shape the colony for nearly two centuries, drawing captives from Madagascar, East Africa, and India; many fled into the rugged interior to escape it, and in Saint-Paul alone hundreds became fugitives in the early 1730s. The settlers chose this spot because its leeward shore offered the calmest anchorage and steadiest winds on the island. From this beginning grew a colony, and Saint-Paul became Bourbon's first capital, the seat from which the island was governed until that role shifted permanently to Saint-Denis in 1738.

Olivier Levasseur earned his nickname for the speed with which he fell upon his prey. His greatest prize was the Portuguese ship Nossa Senhora do Cabo, seized off these very waters in 1721 with a hold full of treasure. Captured years later, he was hanged for piracy at Saint-Paul in 1730, in front of the church, and buried in the seaside cemetery nearby. The famous tale - that he flung a 17-line cipher to the spectators crying "Find my treasure, who can!" - is almost certainly fiction, invented in a 20th-century novel and absent from every record of his death. Yet the cryptogram has taken on a life of its own, sending divers and diggers across the Indian Ocean in search of a hoard that may never have existed. The grave endures as both a curiosity and a monument to how a good story outlives the truth.

Pirates are not the only famous residents of the Cimetière marin. The same ground holds Réunion's literary dead. Leconte de Lisle, born in Saint-Paul in 1818 and later acknowledged as France's foremost poet after the aging Victor Hugo, is commemorated here, along with the poet Eugène Dayot and the painter Arthur Grimaud. There is a fitting symmetry to a cemetery that gathers a buccaneer and a Parnassian poet beneath the same cliffs - the violent and the lyrical sides of a small island that, for all its remoteness, kept reaching toward the wider world.

Saint-Paul today is Réunion's second-largest town, strung along its bay beneath the towering rampart of the interior. Its lively Friday and Saturday market spills across the seafront, a riot of vanilla, spices, fruit, and woven baskets that has long been a fixture of island life. The graceful Hôtel de Ville dates from around 1740, a survivor of the colonial era. Just inland rises a landscape so steep and folded that Réunion's planners have struggled for decades to connect Saint-Paul to the rest of the island - a proposed tram line to the town was abandoned in 2010 for lack of funds. The mountains that make Saint-Paul beautiful also keep it hemmed against the sea, exactly as they did when the first settlers chose this shore.