Accommodating the first residents
After two temporary occupations from 1646 to 1649 and from 1654 to 1658, the final settlement of the Bourbons in Saint-Paul began in November 1663.
Louis Payen and his unknown companion leave the French trading post Fort Dauphin in Madagascar and settle on the deserted island with ten Malagasy servants (including three women). They bring tools, seeds and livestock with them. Thanks to the bay, naturally inviting to ships, and attracted by the fresh water near the shore, they settle at the back of the coastal strip, at the foot of the mountain slope, near a cave between the Ravine Bernica and the Cap de la Marianne .
The first "Maroons"
Disputes quickly arise between the two French and the Malagasy, which causes the latter to move towards the Hauts... the beginning of the story of maroonage (escape of the slaves into the mountains)...
Two years later, Louis Payen leaves the island forever, while Etienne Regnault and twenty settlers from various professions settle the island of Bourbon...
They settle on the edge of the cliffs, at the end of the pond, in the direction of today's Bassin Vital. The Malagasy people who left "maroon" finally return to the village of "Vieux Saint-Paul" to form the first roots of the Creole families of Bourbon.
Today, the inhabitants of La Réunion know the place as "Cave of the First Frenchmen" or "Cave of the First Reunionese", but the cave had several names: "La Caverne" (which gave the neighborhood its name), "Caverne des Matelots ", "Caverne des Portugais" (after a lithograph by Antoine Roussin), "Hut of the Twelve Exiles" or "Cemetery of the Blacks" (approximately at this point on the Chandelier map from 1806)... Its official name today is La Grotte du Peuplement.