Heritage Spice House: Museum, Spice Grinding & Take-Home Masala

Step into the Mauritius of a hundred years ago at a family-run heritage museum and working spice house on the south coast, ten minutes from Souillac. Guided throughout by a member of the family, you walk a living spice garden where turmeric, combava, curry leaf and lemongrass grow within a few steps of each other. You enter an old traditional kitchen, and a museum of everyday objects kept for three generations: charcoal irons, brass scales, a grandmother's sewing machine, a harmonium that crossed an ocean in a family's luggage. Then you grind. On a ross cari, the volcanic stone Mauritian kitchens used for generations, you make your own masala by hand. Everyone grinds, including children. What you grind goes into the traditional Mauritian tastings that follow, eaten the way island families eat: small bowls, shared, at one table, with time to sit. You leave with a 50g pouch of our masala, still ground by hand in the village our family comes from.