A farm property for sale in La Réunion, a Creole house with its outbuildings or farmland planted with cane, fruit or market-garden crops: the island, between coastline and volcanic highlands, still holds a fabric of small rural properties shaped by its terrain. This page brings together the farmhouses, barns and mas for sale in La Réunion published on ma-propriete.fr: a Creole house with a garden and outbuildings, a sugar-cane farm with a shed, hillside land in the highlands with buildings to renovate.
The La Réunion rural market is narrow, and each property has to be judged on its own, since the island's geography sharply limits supply. This guide sets out where to look and what to check before buying. For a tourist-accommodation project, our white paper on setting up a rural gîte will help you cost it.
La Réunion has no mainland-style mas or barn: traditional rural buildings are based on the wooden Creole house with its veranda, surrounded by light outbuildings, and, on working farms, a shed for equipment or cane and fruit harvests. Corrugated metal roofing dominates, tile remaining rarer outside recent construction.
In the highlands (Cilaos, Salazie, Plaine-des-Palmistes), properties often combine a house with a few hectares of sloping farmland, planted with fruit crops, a Creole garden, or left as pasture for livestock. Converting a shed or outbuilding into a gîte means checking the agricultural zoning of the local plan first.
In the western and southern highlands, around Cilaos, Étang-Salé and Saint-Louis, the choice of farm properties is widest. The wetter Salazie cirque and Plaine-des-Palmistes still hold farms geared towards fruit and market gardening. In the east, around Saint-Benoît and Sainte-Rose, sugar cane remains dominant on the lowland plots.
Communes close to Saint-Denis and the heavily built-up west coast offer few rural properties, and at high price levels; the island's highlands and the wilder south remain more accessible for a farming project.
Check the agricultural classification of the plots in the local plan, which strictly limits new building and any change of use of existing structures. Check the corrugated metal roof and its resistance to cyclone-force winds, the timber frame, the drainage system, and exposure to flooding and land movement, both common in the highlands.
On cultivated land, a pre-emption right held by the Safer land agency may apply. Also check actual access to the plot (rural tracks, rights of way), sometimes limited in the more remote parts of the cirques.
On ma-propriete.fr, filter La Réunion farms and rural properties by budget and land area, set up an email alert to be told of new listings, and extend your search to all rural properties for sale.
