Their restaurants offer dishes created by Michelin-starred chefs, and the service is second to none. If your time away would seem incomplete without a personal attendant to pour your favourite cocktail, sprinkle your bed with petals and wrap your laundry in tissue paper, you’ll fit right in. It’s hardly surprising that many visitors choose to cocoon themselves in the blissful dreamworld of their luxury accommodation. But beyond these cosseting confines, Mauritius has much to offer. Here Emma Gregg suggests six good reasons to explore.

Meet me in Port Louis
Port Louis, the capital, is often overlooked by compulsive beach-baskers – but they’re missing out. In recent years, urban regeneration has brought a new sparkle to its jumble of French and British colonial architecture. Islanders grumble about traffic jams, but for visitors accustomed to far larger cities, Port Louis is an enjoyably animated little town, with all the buzz of a mid-ocean trading post.

Mauritians are very proud of their highly harmonious brand of multiculturalism, and nowhere is this more evident than on the city streets. The island’s key position between Asia and Africa made it a magnet for explorers, pirates, traders, settlers and labourers from all the seafaring nations. Today, Mauritian Hindus, Muslims and Christians with ancestors hailing from India, China, Africa and Europe rub along peacefully enough, and while French and English may be the official languages, you’re just as likely to hear snatches of Creole, Hindi or Chinese.

The city’s commercial focus is the revamped market, where locals load up their shopping bags with papayas, plump bananas and big bunches of lychees.

Upstairs, there’s a small bazaar, a tidy maze of stalls selling spices, baskets, Indian throws, hangings, cushions and sarongs. There’s more shopping at the Caudan Waterfront, where once-derelict dockside buildings have been scrubbed up as an arcade. The Blue Penny Museum, nearby, has fascinating displays on maritime and colonial history, as well as examples of the island’s famously rare and valuable stamps.

In the suburban towns south of the capital – Rose Hill, Quatre Bornes, Floreal and Curepipe – catholic churches with impressive spires and Hindu temples in fondant icing colours sit among streets lined with small businesses. It’s here that you can treat yourself to the most distinctive of Mauritian souvenirs – a handcrafted scale model of a historic galleon, complete with intricate rigging and hand-furled sails.

Visit an uncommon garden
Mark Twain had a point – Mauritius is not the place to come for heart-stopping seascapes and mountain ranges. But it’s blessed with a kindly climate that allows gorgeous tropical plants to flourish. The Sir Seewoosagur Ramgoolam Botanical Garden near Pamplemousses, a stately expanse of lawns, orchards, spice bushes and lotus pools, boasts some 80 species of palm tree, some of them rather rare. Taking pride of place is an ornamental pond full of enormous water lilies, with moorhens stepping daintily from pad to pad. The garden is also home to a family of giant tortoises.

Hugely popular with locals for weekend strolls, this is above all a cool and pleasant place to muse on the bounties of nature. An inscription on a monument to the French novelist Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre puts it rather nicely: “The gift of a useful plant seems to me more precious than the discovery of a goldmine, and a monument more lasting than a pyramid.”

Uncover the interior
Mauritius is about five times the size of the Isle of Wight – large enough to encompass quite a variety of scenery, but compact enough to explore fairly comprehensively in three or four days. Any taxi driver will gladly whizz you around the sights, from waterfalls and tea plantations to drifts of multicoloured sand, but naturally you’ll get much more out of your trip if you hire a professional guide.

Sugar cane cultivation has shaped much of the Mauritian landscape and just before the harvest, some country roads feel like tunnels, hemmed in by high walls of cane. Recently, however, market forces have led the plantation owners to diversify. Some have sold parcels of land to developers signed up for property investment schemes; others have gone into adventure tourism. Thus you can canter or roar through a leafy estate one morning, and fly through the trees like a fruit bat the same afternoon, courtesy of the horse riding, quad biking and zip-lining operations found in the south of the island.

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Dip a toe in the big blue
Sparkling turquoise and indigo waters beckon from every turn of the hundred-mile coastline, making Mauritius an enviable destination for watersports enthusiasts. The calm waters of Grand Baie in the north are perfect for pottering around in a dinghy or kayak – those at Veranda Grand Baie can even get a look into the big blue from their glass-bottom boat. The breezier stretches around Le Morne in the far southwest attract hardcore windsurfers and kitesurfers, while those looking for softer sailing can spend a leisurely afternoon cruising the west coast aboard a large catamaran with an on-deck barbecue.

Underwater, there are sunken lava caves and wrecks to explore. The best sites are tucked around the offshore islands: here, scuba divers can get nose-to-nose with magnificently colourful angelfish, butterflyfish and parrotfish.

Sunday on the beach, local style
Officially, all Mauritian beaches are public property, but unofficially, there’s a strict demarcation between those that the luxury resorts claim as their own, and the rest. For a truly authentic beach experience, steer clear of the groomed sand outside the hotels and head instead for Mont Choisy in the north, Belle Mare in the east or Ile aux Cerfs just offshore. Mauritians are great beach enthusiasts, and a favourite way to spend a weekend afternoon is to gather the extended family for a huge picnic under the casuarina trees. Cool-boxes are carefully unpacked to reveal golden samosas and rotis, flat breads with spicy sauces. For those who haven’t brought their own lunch, stallholders sell cold drinks and tasty snacks such as sweet little pineapples, neatly peeled so that the leaves serve as a handle.

Discover your inner eco-adventurer
Mauritius has the odd distinction of being better known for dead animals than for living ones. It was once home to over-sized reptiles and bats, and to one of the most famous extinct species ever to waddle about on this planet: the dodo. All met their demise through thoughtless exploitation. Over the centuries, many plant species have suffered the same fate.

Today, as in many corners of the tropics, conservationists are battling against the encroachment of non-native plants. The indigenous flora described by Twain as “a ragged luxuriance of tropic vegetation of vivid greens of varying shades” has been decimated by sugar cane plantations and by the spread of ornamental or functional species such as flame trees, eucalyptus and Chinese guava.

To explore a wilderness that feels relatively untamed, it’s worth heading to Black River Gorges in the southwest, where you can spot monkeys, birds and even wild boar from the little-used hiking tracks. Ile aux Aigrettes, which lies within kayaking distance of the east coast, is a fine exttample of conservation in action: here researchers are working to preserve native species, including the endangered pink pigeon. And at the La Vanille Réserve des Mascareignes in the south, you can wander through little pockets of rainforest, a reminder of what the island might have been like before the first Europeans left their mark.

Emma Gregg travelled with Virgin Atlantic (www.virgin-atlantic.com), White Sand Tours (www.whitesandtours.com) and Nature Trails (www.mauritius-nt.com), with the assistance of the Mauritius Tourism Promotion Authority.