In 2020, officers from the Office national des forêts et du Parc national de La Réunion announced that they had made a series of discoveries in thearea of the Glacière du Maïdo, a district of Saint-Paul. A day survey was organised with the people who discovered the site to identify, describe and record the reported remains.
The ice trade
From the 1820s up until the advent of modern freezers, there was an ice trade on the island. The sources mention, for example, that Madame Desbassyns, the owner of the domaine de Villèle, liked to offer her guests sorbets and iced drinks. The ice would have come from this high-altitude area of the Maïdo, where surface water froze overnight in basins or natural depressions before being collected at daybreak. Blocks of ice weighing up to 25 kg were then stored at low temperature in wells and then transported in jute bags ("gonis") and sawdust by slaves over a distance of sixty kilometers, until the abolition of slavery in 1848.
Recent archaeological observations
Wells and an icebox are still visible on the trail connecting the Maïdo car park to Le Grand Bénare. Surveys performed by archaeologists and officers from the ONF and the national park reveal the scale of the ice-production facilities in this section of the upper Trois-Bassins, including multiple ice storage areas dug into the natural volcanic hollows. The sector around the ice storage caves are scattered with portable finds, suggesting heavy ice-related activities in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
