We rent scooters on Rodrigues, so you would expect us to tell you to come. Instead, here is the case against — first, and with numbers — because the visitors who have a bad time here are almost always the ones who arrived expecting Mauritius and found something else.
Do not come here for a resort
Statistics Mauritius counts 109 licensed hotels on the Island of Mauritius, with 14,112 rooms between them, and classes a hotel as 'large' at more than 80 rooms — 61 of them qualify.
The Rodrigues Tourism Office lists eight hotels for the entire island, and the best known of them, Constance Tekoma, has 32 rooms. Not one Rodrigues property reaches that 'large' threshold. Official hotel statistics do not even cover Rodrigues: there is no published room-capacity series for the island at all.
There is no golf, effectively no nightlife, and no shopping beyond the market and the village shops. If any of that is what a holiday means to you, go to Mauritius. You will have a better time, and we would rather say so now than take your booking.
What you get instead
A lagoon of roughly 240 km² wrapped around an island of about 110 km² — so there is more than twice as much water as land. You will also read that Rodrigues has the largest lagoon in the Indian Ocean. It does not: the Great Chagos Bank, in the same ocean, is 12,642 km². The true figure is impressive enough without the superlative.
Beaches you will have to yourself on a weekday, and the arithmetic makes that inevitable rather than lucky. Of 141,738 arrivals in 2024, 86,889 were residents of the Island of Mauritius and another 28,053 were Rodriguans coming home. The United Kingdom accounted for 532 people. The United States, 290.
That is the real character of the place. Rodrigues is where Mauritius goes on holiday, not where the world does.
It is not simply a smaller Mauritius
Rodrigues has been an autonomous region since 2001–02, under Chapter VIA of the Constitution, with its own Regional Assembly of 18 elected members and its own Capital and Consolidated Funds. It makes its own law in the areas listed in the Fourth Schedule of the Rodrigues Regional Assembly Act — fisheries, agriculture, environment, marine parks, forestry.
That is not a technicality a visitor can ignore. The octopus closed season that shapes the island's most famous dish is Rodriguan law, made here, and it is the reason there is still octopus to eat.
Language differs too. At the 2022 census, Creole was the language usually spoken at home for 42,832 of 43,604 Rodriguans — 98.2%, against 77.9% on Mauritius. Sixteen people gave English and 117 gave French. Bhojpuri, spoken at home by tens of thousands of Mauritians, is essentially absent here.
The size of the place
The 2022 census counted 43,604 residents; the official estimate at the end of 2024 was 44,313. Mauritius has 1,189,493 people on 1,868 km².
How far apart are they? Officially, nobody agrees. Published figures run from 553 km to 650 km, and two Mauritian government bodies disagree with each other by 50 km. We are not going to pick one for the look of it. It is a short flight and a long ferry, and that is the part that affects your plans.
Fishing is the economy in a way it simply is not on the mainland: 2,504 registered fishing boats and 1,179 registered fishermen — including 159 professional fisherwomen — among 44,000 people.
Who should choose Rodrigues over Mauritius?
People who want an island rather than a hotel. If your idea of a good week is a scooter, a lagoon, a walk down to a beach with nobody on it, and dinner cooked by whoever's house you booked, Rodrigues is close to unimprovable.
People who want to be looked after by staff in uniform will find the island bewildering and slightly boring, and the honest advice is to spend that money in Mauritius.
Plenty of people do both, and it is the sensible answer: Rodrigues is a short hop from Mauritius, and a week split between them shows you two genuinely different countries inside one republic.
Ready to explore Rodrigues?
Rent a scooter or car directly from local owners — or let Ti Roulé, our free island guide, build a plan around your dates.