Muséum d'histoire naturelle de la Réunion, Natural history museum in Saint-Denis, Réunion.
The Muséum d'histoire naturelle de La Réunion occupies a two-storey neoclassical building of 1834 with a white facade, a hipped roof of pale grey panels edged in reddish-brown, and a central portico of six columns with square capitals; "MUSEUM" is lettered above the columns. It stands behind a pond and trees in the Jardin de l'État. Inside are 560,000 specimens, two-thirds from the western Indian Ocean islands.
The building went up in 1834 to house the colonial council, then the general council until 1848. Governor Louis Henri Hubert-Delisle signed the museum's founding decree on 1 February 1854, and it opened on 14 August 1855 as the first natural history museum in the Indian Ocean. It was classified in full as a Monument historique on 29 December 1978.
The museum's name comes from the Latin word for a place of study, and its 1854 founding decree assigned it to gather specimens from the Indian Ocean. A gallery opened in November 2017, "Collections collectionneurs", traces the donors behind the collection, from the mayor Gustave Manès to the customs service and the former Saint-Denis zoo.
The museum stands inside the Jardin de l'État, so you enter through the public garden. The building is closed on Tuesdays and open the rest of the week. Allow time to walk the garden paths around the pond before or after the galleries.
The building holds a scientific library with rare books and engravings from the 18th and 19th centuries that document the region's natural world. These old papers show how people once viewed and understood the islands.
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