Reunion Island Helicopter Tour Over Piton de la Fournaise
A reunion island helicopter tour lifts off from Saint-Paul or Saint-Pierre and traces the island's volcanic spine, passing the Trou de Fer waterfall, the cirques of Mafate, Salazie and Cilaos, and the lava flows of Piton de la Fournaise. Most reunion island helicopter tour tours follow the UNESCO-listed Pitons, cirques and remparts, with the pilot narrating over headsets as the aircraft banks along the Voile de la Mariée and the coral lagoon at Saint-Gilles. Seats are assigned by weight and balance, so every passenger has a window.
The island beneath the rotors is younger than the Pyramids: Piton de la Fournaise first broke the ocean surface roughly 530,000 years ago, and it has erupted more than 180 times since 1640. That volcano remains one of the most active on Earth, and almost none of it can be reached by road.
Helicopter operations from Aéroport de Pierrefond in Saint-Pierre exist for that reason. Réunion's interior is a collapsed shield volcano — the Piton des Neiges massif — whose flanks fell inward to form three cirques: Cilaos, Salazie and Mafate. Mafate has no road at all. Its 800-odd residents receive supplies by air, and the same corridors used for that traffic frame the classic reunion island helicopter tour. The island's UNESCO World Heritage listing, granted in 2010, covers roughly forty percent of its surface, including the Trou de Fer, a canyon where water drops close to 300 metres into rainforest that few walkers ever see from below.
Aviation shaped access here long before tourism did. Travellers researching how to fly to reunion island quickly learn the answer to how many airports in reunion island: two commercial fields — Roland Garros near Sainte-Marie in the north, and Pierrefond in the south, the smaller of the pair and the base for scenic rotorcraft. The question of what airlines fly to reunion island points mainly toward Paris, Mauritius, Madagascar and Johannesburg routings, a colonial-era air map inherited from the sugar and mail years. Pierrefond, opened for civil traffic in 1997, was built for the leeward half of the island, and its dry-side weather is precisely what makes morning departures viable.
What a helicopter tour of Reunion Island shows is a vertical country. Basaltic ramparts rise 2,000 metres in a few kilometres. Tamarin forest gives way to alpine scrub near the Piton des Neiges summit at 3,070 metres. The Enclos Fouqué caldera holds black lava flows from eruptions dated to 2007, 2015 and later cycles, still unvegetated, still legible as separate events. Réunion aerial sightseeing therefore functions as geology lecture as much as spectacle — the strata are exposed, the collapse structures are obvious, and the scale of the island's relief only resolves from altitude. For visitors comparing a reunion island helicopter tour tour against ground itineraries, the distinction is simple: the roads circle the coast, while the interior belongs to the air.
55 min
