From top, left to right: Panoramic view of the city from the heights of Bellepierre; cannons at theBarachois waterfront;Saint-Denis Cathedral; Palais de la Source, seat of thedepartmental council; Saint-Denis's historicHôtel de Ville and Victory Column; La Réunion's Natural History Museum; city center andIndian Ocean in the evening.
Saint-Denis was founded in 1669 byÉtienne Regnault, the first governor of Bourbon Island (as La Réunion was then called), on the northern side of the island, where a larger and more fertile plain was deemed more propitious for the development of settlements than the drier and more barren area ofSaint-Paul on the western side of the island. Saint-Paul had been the site of Bourbon Island's first French settlement in 1663 due to the better anchorage and wind conditions of the western coast.
The new settlement was named Saint-Denis after the name of a ship owned by one of governor Regnault's friends, which had landed in Réunion in 1668. Saint-Denis and Saint-Paul shared the role of colonial capital of Bourbon for some years, with the governor and colonial council staying alternatively in the two settlements, until Saint-Denis was chosen as the permanent location of Bourbon's colonial government in 1738.
Soon after 1738, work was started to establish a seaport in the little bay of LeBarachois, on the eastern side of the Saint-Denis River, to replace the port of Saint-Paul, but its site did not offer a safe haven, due to unpredictable winds and tides, as well as frequent high surf which forced ships to unload their cargo in the openroadstead away from the shore, from where it was carried to the shore with the use of a mobile pier. Improvements in the 19th century resulted in the construction of a small artificial harbor where surf boats in charge of unloading cargo from larger ships could be protected from winds and swells, but it was regularly damaged bycyclones. Eventually it was replaced by a new and much larger artificial harbor built on the northwest coast of La Réunion in the 1880s, in today's commune ofLe Port, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) from Saint-Denis.
A royal decree in 1766 divided Bourbon Island in 5quartiers, one of which was Saint-Denis. The checkerboard plan of the city, established by land surveyor Jean-Baptiste Bancks (sometimes spelled Banck, ofIrish Jacobite descent), was officially adopted in 1777. In 1790, Saint-Denis became acommune. Its first mayor was Jean-Baptiste Delestrac.
During theNapoleonic Wars, Saint-Denis was captured by British troops on 8 July 1810. The British occupied Saint-Denis and the entire island during nearly 5 years. On 6 April 1815, after theTreaty of Paris, the British officially restored Bourbon Island to France during a ceremony held on the main square of Saint-Denis. Later in October 1815, as news ofNapoleon'sreturn to France had arrived in the Indian Ocean, a British fleet fromMauritius presented itself in front of St Denis, asking the French governor of Bourbon Island to surrender the colony to His Britannic Majesty. The French governor refused and the British started a blockade of the island. Eventually on 28 October the news arrived of Napoleon's2nd abdication andLouis XVIII's return to power, and the British fleet ended its blockade.
In the 18th century, cultivation of coffee had ensured the development of Saint-Denis. Warehouses in Saint-Denis stored the coffee beans before their export to Europe from the port of Saint-Denis. In the 19th century, following France's loss of its largest sugar colonies ofSaint-Domingue (Haiti) and theIsle of France (Mauritius) as a result of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, sugarcane replaced coffee as the main crop in Bourbon, and sugar became the main export, again ensuring the development of Saint-Denis, from where sugar was exported to Europe.
The prosperous period experienced by Saint-Denis after the Napoleonic Wars was marked by urban development and public investments. In 1818, due to the British annexation of the Isle of France (Mauritius) which was home to the onlylycée in theMascarene Islands, where Bourbon Island's elites used to send their children forsecondary education, Bourbon Island's governorMilius [fr] launched the construction of a royal college in Saint-Denis (Collège de Bourbon [fr]), which opened in 1819, the first royal college on Bourbon Island (later renamed Lycée de La Réunion in 1848, then transformed into acollège, i.e.middle school, in 1968). In 1825 a law school (École de Jurisprudence) granting theBachelor of Laws was established in Saint-Denis.
Construction of theSaint-Denis Cathedral was begun in 1829 and completed in 1832. The theatre of Saint-Denis was built in 1835 with loggias and balconies (it was later destroyed by fire in 1919). That same year, construction of thePalais législatif ("Legislative Palace") was begun and completed in 1837: the palace housed the Colonial Council (Conseil colonial), the legislative assembly of Bourbon Island; the palace was later turned over in 1855 to the newly createdNatural History Museum of La Réunion [fr], the firstnatural history museum in theIndian Ocean. In 1843, following the example of Mauritius wherehorse races had become popular among French colonial planters, a racecourse was inaugurated atLa Redoute, now transformed into a stadium. Construction of theHôtel de Ville was started in 1846 and the building was inaugurated in 1860.[6] Thecentral market of Saint-Denis [fr], a wrought iron structure, was built between 1864 and 1866.
Thefirst cholera pandemic struck Saint-Denis in the beginning of 1820: cholera had arrived fromCalcutta in Mauritius the year before, and despite strict orders from governor Milius forbidding any contact with Mauritius, one ship arriving from Mauritius evaded the orders and brought cholera to Saint-Denis. The authorities reacted quickly as soon as the disease was discovered in town by isolating sick people, establishing a militarycordon sanitaire, and evacuating the rest of the population from the city. As a result, cholera was contained within the city limits and killed only 178 people (whereas it spread all over Mauritius and killed thousands of people there).[7]
In 1841, the famous poetCharles Baudelaire, then 20 year-old, who had been sent on a voyage to Calcutta, India by his family in the hope of ending his dissolute habits, landed in Saint-Denis and stayed on Bourbon Island for 45 days, before deciding to return to metropolitan France without reaching India.
In 1847, the return to Bourbon Island of the CatholicApostolic Vice-Prefect of the island,Alexandre Monnet, anabolitionist who had worked for theevangelization of Bourbon's Black slaves and was returning from a trip to Europe where he had been celebrated in Paris and Rome for his work in favor of Black slaves, triggered two days of protests in Saint-Denis among the White colonists, who insulted the Apostolic Vice-Prefect without governorJoseph Graëb [fr] intervening to stop the turmoil. Due to strong opposition, and without any local support, Father Monnet, nicknamed the Father of Black People (le Père des Noirs), was forced to leave Bourbon Island only fifteen days later at the urging of the governor.
On 9 June 1848, after the arrival of news of theFebruary 1848 French Revolution from Europe, governor Graëb announced the proclamation of the French Republic in Saint-Denis, and the island's name was changed to La Réunion, the name it had already held between 1793 and 1806. The establishment of the Republic was met with coldness and distrust by the wealthy White planters due to the professed abolitionism of the new Republican authorities in Paris. On 18 October 1848 the newCommissioner of the Republic,Sarda Garriga, sent from Paris to replace governor Graëb, announced in Saint-Denis theabolition of slavery in Réunion Island, effective on 20 December 1848. In December the students at the lycée of Saint-Denis, sons of rich planters, demonstrated against the director of the lycée, a declared republican. Unable to calm the protestors, commissioner Sarda Garriga was forced to call in the troops and close the lycée for more than a month.
In 1853, theBanque de La Réunion [fr] was founded in Saint-Denis with part of the compensation paid to Réunion's slave owners by the French government after the 1848 abolition of slavery. It was the first commercial bank in Réunion, and also served as a central bank, with the legal right to issue banknotes. The next year asavings bank was also established in Saint-Denis.
Saint-Denis was struck by thethird cholera pandemic in 1859, the first time cholera was returning to Réunion since 1820. During the outbreaks of cholera in Mauritius in 1854 and 1856, strict sanitary measures forbidding the landing of ships in Réunion had prevented the disease from reaching the island. In 1859, however, a ship transportingindentured laborers from East Africa hid the cases of cholera on board from the Saint-Denis authorities and the ship was allowed to land. Cholera spread quickly and killed 863 people in the city (and 2,200 people in the entire island) in the space of two months and a half, one of the deadliest epidemics in the history of Réunion.
In the 1860s, cane cultivation was affected by theChilo sacchariphagus pest, and the recruiting of labourers in India also became more difficult (caps introduced by British authorities), which led to a crisis of Réunion's sugar cane industry. During the same period, the island was hit by severalcyclones.Malaria also arrived in Réunion in 1868, three years after its arrival in Mauritius (both islands were malaria-free before the 1860s), and the disease became endemic in the island. The opening of theSuez Canal in 1869 as well as the French growing interest incolonizing Madagascar also marginalized Réunion. As a result of all these events, Saint-Denis entered a period of stagnation that lasted untilWorld War II. The city even officially experienced population decline from the 1870s until the beginning of the 1920s, before recovering slightly after 1921 (see Demographics section).
In 1868, bitter press campaigns opposing localliberal (anti-clerical) andclerical (pro-Jesuit) newspapers degenerated when the editor-in-chief of the clerical newspaperLa Malle was rumored to have sexually assaulted the son of a merchant from Saint-Denis. The rumor led to five days of anti-clerical riots in the city in November-December 1868, with crowds of up to 2,000 gathering in front of the bishop's palace, shouting "Down withLa Malle! Down with the Jesuits!", and ransacking the college (high school) of the Jesuits. On 3 December governorMarie Jules Dupré ordered the dispersal of the unarmed anti-clerical crowd assembled on the square in front of the Saint-Denis Hôtel de Ville, and the troops opened fire, killing 9 people and injuring another 30 people. The next day, astate of siege was declared. The tragedy had nationwide repercussions in France in the dying days of theSecond French Empire which opposed liberals and conservatives.
Dutch camp set up at the Barachois seafront by the Oudemans mission for the 1874 transit of Venus.
On 3 November 1870, after ships had brought the news ofNapoleon III's fall and proclamation of the French Republic in Paris, governorLouis Hippolyte de Lormel announced the proclamation of the French Republic in Saint-Denis. That same year, the first telegraph line in Réunion was established between Saint-Denis and the southern Réunionesesubprefecture ofSaint-Pierre, 110 kilometres (68 mi) in length.
A 10.5 kilometres (6.5 mi) railway tunnel dug in the big lava flow separating Saint-Denis fromLa Possession was started in 1878 and completed in 1881, allowing trains to connect Saint-Denis with the new seaport of La Réunion under construction atLe Port in replacement of the old harbor of Barachois in Saint-Denis. It was the third-longest tunnel in the world at the time.
In 1891, the first streets in the centre of Saint-Denis started to be lit with electric lighting. In 1896, the firstpublic screening with amovie projector of theLumière brothers brought from Paris took place in the Saint-Denis city hall. In 1900 the firstautomobile arrived in Saint-Denis, aPeugeot car.
In 1896, the first Chinese temple in Réunion and in France was opened in Saint-Denis, the Chane temple (陈宅), also called Shichantang (世昌堂), dedicated toGuandi and to the ancestral worship of the Chane (陈) family, one of the Cantonese families arrived in Réunion in the 1860s and 1870s as Chinese labourers. In 1905 was inaugurated in Saint-Denis theNoor-e-Islam Mosque, the oldest mosque in France (outside ofMayotte), whose construction was authorized by the governor of Réunion in 1898 after several requests from the Muslim inhabitants of the island, Indians originally fromGujarat arrived in Réunion in the 1850s. The firstHindu temple in Saint-Denis, theTamilKalikambal Temple [fr], was inaugurated in 1917.
In 1897, queenRanavalona III of Madagascar was deported to Saint-Denis, where she lived for two years before being deported toFrench Algeria. SultanSaid Ali bin Said Omar of Grande Comore was also exiled to Réunion where he lived in Saint-Denis in the end of the 1890s and beginning of the 1900s. The deposed emperor of VietnamThành Thái and his son the emperorDuy Tân were both exiled to Réunion by French authorities in 1916 and they lived in Saint-Denis until World War II. The Moroccan rebel leaderAbd el-Krim, founder of theRepublic of the Rif, was also exiled to Réunion in 1926 after his surrender to French troops, and he lived in Saint-Denis until 1929, before moving toLes Trois-Bassins.
TheSpanish flu hit Saint-Denis in April and May 1919, killing thousands of people. During theHoly Week of 1919 alone, the Spanish flu killed nearly 1,000 people in Saint-Denis, a city which had less than 24,000 inhabitants at the time.
Radiotelegraphy services began operation in Saint-Denis in 1923, with a radiotelegraphy station opened in old military barracks at the Barachois. The first radio program broadcast to the public took place in 1927, and the first radio station, Radio Saint-Denis, went on the air in 1929.
In 1938, the old harbor of Le Barachois was filled to create a large square in order to host a largecolonial exhibition. On 10 April 1940 the last public execution in Réunion took place at dawn on that square at the Barachois: two men wereguillotined for the savage murder of a 78 year-old female shopkeeper in 1937.
In June 1940, after theFall of France, governorPierre Émile Aubert [fr] decided to declare his loyalty toMarshal Pétain, unlike the French colonial governors in the South Pacific surrounded by British territories, who chose to rallyde Gaulle'sFree French, and he cut all communications with Mauritius. The British established a naval blockade of Réunion which led to severe food shortages andrationing. The governor pushed local authorities to followVichy France policies. In Saint-Denis, the square of Barachois was renamed squareMarshal Pétain by the municipal council in February 1941. A Pétain Propaganda Committee was created in Saint-Denis in December 1941, as well as a Marshal Pétain Guard made up of 800 followers of theRévolution nationale. At the same time, an underground resistance movement started to organize itself.
After the successfulBritish landing in Vichy-held Madagascar, and faced with the impossibility to defend Réunion's coastline, governor Aubert on 27 September 1942 decided to declare Saint-Denis anopen city and retreat toHell-Bourg, in the interior of the island. On 28 November theFree French Naval Forces (FNFL) destroyerLéopard, sailing from Mauritius, arrived off Saint-Denis and landed troops unopposed. These troops captured the city and established a Free French governor. Governor Aubert surrendered to the Free French governor on 30 November, thus completing theLiberation of Réunion. All Vichy policies enacted under governor Aubert were reversed in late 1942 and in 1943.
After World War II, Saint-Denis entered a new period of population growth and urban development. In February 1945,Air France opened an air route between Paris and Saint-Denis, the first air route linking Réunion with metropolitan France: operated once a week, it took 5 days and 14 stopovers to reach Paris from Saint-Denis. In June 1946, the newer Gillot airfield (nowRoland Garros Airport, the international airport of Réunion) was inaugurated 6.5 kilometres (4.0 mi) east of Saint-Denis's city center, in the neighboring commune ofSainte-Marie.
In March 1946, the colony of Réunion was turned into anoverseas department of France, which led to the gradual alignment of its social and public services with those of metropolitan France. Malaria eradication campaigns, started in Réunion in 1949 thanks to the newDDT insecticide, led to a dramatic decrease of malaria prevalence in the space of four years, and its complete eradication by 1967.[8] Malaria had acted as a brake on population growth since its arrival in the island in 1868, and with its eradication the island's population soon started to grow tremendously due to high fertility rates.
All these factors, combined withrural flight, led to a new period of rapid expansion for the city of Saint-Denis. After more than 70 years of stagnation, the city's population more than doubled between the 1954 and 1967 censuses.
TheJune 1946 French legislative election was marked by political violence in Réunion, opposingCommunist militants and theChristian-democraticPopular Republican Movement (MRP), which had both emerged from the underground resistance during Vichy rule over the island (1940–1942). On 25 May 1946, in the heat of the campaign, Communist and MRP militants confronted each other in the city center of Saint-Denis, andAlexis de Villeneuve [fr],Gaullist and MRP leader, who was running in the 1st constituency of Réunion (the one including Saint-Denis), where he facedRaymond Vergès, a local Communist leaderelected the year before mayor of Saint-Denis, was shot and killed in the mêlée.Paul Vergès, son of Raymond Vergès, and future founder of theCommunist Party of Réunion (with which he led the regional council of Réunion from 1998 to 2010), was accused of having fired the fatal shot with a gun belonging to his father found on the scene. Found guilty by thecriminal court ofLyon (where the trial had been relocated in order to calm tensions in Réunion), he was grantedamnesty in 1953 by the French government.
In 1956 was begun the construction of a major road linking Saint-Denis andLa Possession (and from there the seaport of Réunion and the western coast of the island), bypassing the big lava flow which had always impeded communications between Saint-Denis and the western coast of the island. Only a slow railway line built in 1878–1881 in a tunnel under the lava flow and a narrow, winding road climbing the lava flow existed until then, which hindered the economic development of Saint-Denis. The new road, built at the bottom of the cliffs almost at sea-level, took 7 years to complete and was opened to traffic in 1963. It was later enlarged as a 4-lane expressway between 1973 and 1976.
In 1957, a large modern hospital was opened in Saint-Denis, theCentre hospitalier Félix-Guyon [fr], one of the results of the transformation of the colony into an overseas department in 1946.
The1959 French municipal elections were once again marked by political violence in Réunion. In Saint-Denis, on election day (15 March 1959), a young Communist militant was shot and killed by a Gaullist militant, and another Communist militant was severely injured by the same gunman. Paul Vergès, who was the Communist candidate to become mayor of Saint-Denis, was beaten byGendarmerie forces during clashes in the streets and left unconscious on the pavement. The Gaullist candidate,Gabriel Macé [fr], was declared winner of the election, but the Communists accused the authorities ofelectoral fraud. This pushed Vergès to secede from the French Communist Party two months later and found the Communist Party of Réunion, which then campaigned for more autonomy from France. Yet in July 1959,Charles de Gaulle, president of France, received a warm welcome on his arrival to Saint-Denis, the first visit by a French head of state since the foundation of the city.
In 1961, the first modern hotel and the first supermarket opened in Saint-Denis. The city's (and more generally the island's) infrastructure, however, was still largely underdeveloped compared tometropolitan France, and many people lived in great poverty. In the countryside, people often resided in huts with bare earth floor, and the housing situation in the city was getting worse every year with the now rapidly growing population. De Gaulle's prime ministerMichel Debré, who had accompanied De Gaulle during his 1959 visit and witnessed the poverty and underdevelopment then prevalent in Réunion, feared that it would push the islanders towards asking independence from France, as had happened in the rest of Africa. After stepping down as prime minister in 1962 following the independence ofFrench Algeria (to which he had been opposed), he was determined to prevent the same fate in Réunion, and decided to stand in the1st constituency of Réunionby-election to theNational Assembly in the beginning of 1963 (after the results of the1962 French legislative election in that constituency, which the mayor of Saint-Denis Gabriel Macé had won, were invalidated by theConstitutional Council due to renewed electoral fraud).
Michel Debré decisively defeated his Communist rival Paul Vergès when the by-election took place in May 1963, and he became the leader of Réunion's Gaullist and right-wing forces opposed to the autonomy of Réunion demanded by the local Communist Party. Debré used his connections in Paris to promote the economic development of the island and bring its housing and infrastructure closer to metropolitan French level, which benefited Saint-Denis as capital of the island. In 1964, the French National Assembly voted the so-called 'Debré Law' (named after its promoter) that facilitated landexpropriation andslum clearance in France's urban areas. The law helped to eradicate theshanty towns that had started to appear in Saint-Denis and other Réunionese cities. The next year was launched the construction of largepublic housing projects (or council estates) in the neighborhood ofLe Chaudron [fr], 4 kilometres (2.5 mi) east of Saint-Denis's city center, to rehouse the people evacuated from the shanty towns, as well as provide housing for low-income newcomers to the city arriving from the countryside. Construction of these projects, capable of housing close to 10,000 people, lasted until 1973.
In December 1964, the firstTV station in Réunion opened in Saint-Denis, a local station of the national broadcasterORTF (which has now becomeRéunion La Première (television)), whosestudios, located at the Barachois near the city center, produced local news programs. A university campus affiliated with theAix-Marseille University was opened gradually in Saint-Denis between 1964 and 1970, later officially becoming theUniversity of Reunion Island in 1982. In August 1967 the first nonstop commercial flights between Saint-Denis and Paris (operated by Air France'sBoeing 707) were launched after the lengthening and modernization of Gillot Airport's runway. Saint-Denis's newmodernist city hall was constructed in the 1970s. The city hosted the firstIndian Ocean Island Games in 1979 (which it hosted again in 1998 and 2015).
Economic development and rising incomes, thanks to financial transfers from metropolitan France, led after the 1960s to aWesternization of the local culture and the emergence of aconsumer society: TV sets became ubiquitous, largehypermarkets appeared on the outskirts of the city as in metropolitan French cities, selling many products imported from metropolitan France, and the ownership ofmotor vehicles became generalized, leading to heavy traffic during rush hours in a city whose public transports were not developed. The high level of unemployment and the highcost of living (in part due to imported goods from metropolitan France, as well as high salaries among the French state's public servants) generated frustration and social tensions among a significant part of the city's population with low incomes, who survived thanks to social benefits introduced after the transformation of Réunion into an overseas department in 1946, and who had difficult access to the consumer society and imported goods.
In 1991, that social tension exploded after the authorities decided to close a TV station,Télé Free Dom, which was broadcasting piratedB movies (action films and erotic movies in particular) andReunionese Creole talk shows, particularly popular among low-income people. Télé Free Dom had been broadcasting from its studios in Saint-Denis without a license for more than 4 years whenCSA, France's electronic media regulatory authority, ordered it to cease operations. Despite protests from its viewers incited by the founder and owner of Télé Free Dom, ametropolitan Frenchman, the French government instructed theprefect of Réunion to seize the transmitter of the TV station on 24 February 1991. A month of riots throughout the city ensued after Télé Free Dom went off air, with their epicenter in the large projects of Le Chaudron built in the 1960s and 1970s.
Hundreds of rioters threw stones at the police, and for several days they torched cars, looted and then set fire to banks, car dealerships, supermarkets, and large DIY and furniture stores in theretail parks on the outskirts of the city. Eight looters died on the night of 25–26 February 1991, trapped inside a burning furniture store, which led to a temporary lull in the riots, but they soon erupted again in March. A visit by prime ministerMichel Rocard on 17 March failed to calm the situation down, and it was only after a visit by France's first ladyDanielle Mitterrand, who went to the projects at Le Chaudron to discuss with local residents and who promised to relay their grievances to the French president, that the riots finally ended on 24 March.
The city is located on the north end of the island, and was a port. Saint-Denis was "originally the main port of Réunion, but an artificial harbour at Le Port, on the northwest coast, replaced it in the 1880s, because of unpredictable winds and tides at Saint-Denis." The city includes some of the island's mountains, with a peak elevation of 2,276 meters (7,467 ft) within the metro area, which begins at sea level at the coast line.[9]
The city has many neighbourhoods:Le Barachois, Bellepierre, Bois-de-Nèfles, La Bretagne (Le Cerf), Le Brûlé, Les Camélias, Centre-ville, Champ-Fleuri,La Montagne (Le Colorado, Ruisseau Blanc, Saint-Bernard), Montgaillard, La Providence, La Rivière Saint-Denis (La Redoute), Ruisseau des Noirs, Saint-François, Saint-Jacques, Sainte-Clotilde (Le Butor, le Chaudron, Commune Prima,Domenjod, Le Moufia), La Source, La Trinité, Vauban
Saint-Denis features atropical monsoon climate (KöppenAm) with two distinct seasons: a hot and humid wet season from December to April and a very warm, less humid drier season for the remaining seven months of the year, with June to October qualifying as true dry season months. The dry season does typically feature relatively light rain, but it is not wet enough to be atropical rainforest climate. During the wet season,tropical cyclones often affect the city.
Climate data for Saint-Denis(Gillot Airport, altitude 8m, 1991–2020 normals, extremes 1953−present)
Saint-Denis is the most populous commune in the Frenchoverseas departments. The population of St Denis has grown substantially since 1954, both in the commune and the metropolitan area. In the 67 years from 1954 to the census in 2021, population has more than tripled. The annual rate of population growth has been lower in the 21st century than in the 20th century.
6.4% in foreign countries (notablyMadagascar, theUnion of the Comoros, andMauritius); half of them were immigrants and the other half were children of French citizens born abroad (children of Réunionese settlers in Madagascar for example)
The closest airport isRoland Garros Airport, 7 km east of the city inSainte-Marie, Réunion, which is also the main international airport ofRéunion.Air Austral is the regional air carrier, with its Indian Ocean hub located at the airport. The airline has begun serving some cities in mainland France. Five or six other airlines serve the airport. There is a good road network in Saint-Denis.
On 15 March 2022 anaerial tramway, named Papang, started operating, stretching 2.7 km (approximately 1.67 mi) and serving 5 stations between the neighbourhoods of Le Chaudron and Bois-de-Nèfles.[19]
TheUniversity of Reunion Island admits 15,000 students each year, with 6 campus sites in Saint-Denis.[22] Course work is aligned with European standards for university education. There is a school of engineering as well. The language is French, and there are connections with educational institutions in France on the continent of Europe.
The commune maintains various elementary schools for each sector.[23]
IBM has an office in Saint-Denis.[24] The island began organizing to be a digital hub for nearby African nations, relying on its two undersea cables for good internet connections.[25] The potential for services would alter the island's economy, now reliant on sugar, an agricultural product. The university in Saint-Denis has programs to educate the young population in digital skills.[25] New businesses are forming to serve the needs of airlines for software.[25]
Sentenced to exile in Réunion, the Moroccan RaisAbd el-Krim lived a few years in Saint-Denis from 1926 to 1947.
PrinceBảo Vàng of Vietnam (also known as Yves Claude Vinh San) the son of EmperorDuy Tân, was born and resided in Saint-Denis, Réunion for his final years. His family also resided there.
^"Répertoire national des élus: les maires".data.gouv.fr, Plateforme ouverte des données publiques françaises (in French). 2 December 2020.Archived from the original on 17 December 2020. Retrieved8 December 2020.
^Melton, J. Gordon; Baumann, Martin, eds. (2010)."Réunion".Religions of the World: A Comprehensive Encyclopedia of Beliefs and Practices. Vol. 5.ABC-Clio. pp. 2411–2412.ISBN978-1-59884-204-3. Retrieved1 November 2020.
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