The eruption came from Piton de la Fournaise, the active volcano that built and still builds the eastern third of Réunion. As the lava advanced on the village, residents fled, and most of what stood in the flow's path was destroyed. The church's survival became a local miracle, but the honest version is more complicated than the legend. By more careful accounts, the lava did breach the entrance and damage the interior; what endured was the shell of the building while the land around it was scoured clean. That a structure should remain standing at all, in the middle of a flow that erased crops and houses, was remarkable enough. The molten rock was later cleared from the doorway, and the church returned to service. Stained-glass windows inside now depict the eruption that nearly consumed it.

Sainte-Rose faces directly into the trade winds, on the windward side of one of the rainiest islands on Earth, and the numbers are staggering. This is one of the wettest inhabited places anywhere, mentioned in the same breath as Cherrapunji in India and Quibdó in Colombia. Moist Indian Ocean air piles up against the volcano and dumps its load here, feeding a tropical rainforest climate where rain falls in every month and the vegetation grows with jungle ferocity. Higher up the slopes the air cools toward something gentler, but down on the coast, life is lived under frequent, generous, drenching rain.

Follow the coast to the Pointe des Cascades and you reach a genuine edge of the world. This headland is the easternmost point of Réunion - and because Réunion is a full department of France, it is also the easternmost point of France itself and of the entire European Union. Stand here and the next land east is thousands of kilometers of open ocean. It is a fitting place for a frontier: black volcanic rock, white surf, and nothing beyond but water and horizon.

Life at Sainte-Rose has always meant living with the volcano and the elements, and the village has learned to turn some of that energy to use. In 2004 it became home to the first wind farm on the island, harvesting the same relentless trade winds that bring the rain. It is a small modern footnote to a place defined by deep forces - the eruptions that keep reshaping the coastline, the storms that soak it, and a single church that stood its ground against the fire.