The crab under the varangue

In Saint-Philippe, on the Route des Laves, Le Crabe sous la Varangue perfectly embodies the spirit of the wild South. Catherine and Juanito offer three guest rooms, including one adapted for people with reduced mobility. Their home is an unspoilt place to live, designed to welcome without spoiling, where authenticity is not a concept but a way of life. Wood-fired cooking, local produce, fish caught by Juanito, family welcome: everything reflects a desire to live in harmony with the environment. Without artifice, the welcome is in keeping with the values ofEsprit parc national values: simplicity, sharing and respect for the living.

We're located in a magnificent forest, so it seemed logical to us to keep a house that was truly Creole and not make it into something ultra-modern, especially in Saint-Philippe.

Upstairs we receive our visitors, and in the living room we all have aperitifs together. It's also a place where they can come and relax, and downstairs we have the three bedrooms. There are two bedrooms, a double and a triple. Opposite, we have a small cabin which is a family room sleeping four.

I'm an interior designer by training, so I'm obviously sensitive to architecture and particularly to Reunion's heritage. We wanted to keep the old-fashioned feel of the house and bring it back to life as a casse-créole.

Cooking over a wood fire and working primarily with local produce is an obvious choice. We eat a lot of fish because my husband is also a fisherman.

We welcome people as we are, and haven't really changed our way of life to fit in with thenational park spirit. I think we're pretty much in line with the approach in the sense that we wanted to preserve this nature and live with it, not impose ourselves on it but live with it, and here we live with it because we're also vanilla producers. We've understood that nature decides everything, and for me that's one of the most important values.