The windmills of Marie-Galante

A hundred mills, really?

Almost. In 1830 the island had 105 sugar mills, but more than half were still turned by oxen. Windmills, which appeared around 1780, multiplied between 1815 and 1835, when sugar sold well. According to historians, there were never a hundred at once: 78 at most, around 1835–1840.

How a sugar mill worked

A slightly tapered stone tower, six to nine meters high, topped with a pointed roof of essentes, or wooden shingles. The roof swivels: a long wooden tail pole reaches down to the ground, and a few men push it to turn the sails into the wind. The shaft drives three rollers, the rolles, between which the cane is fed; the juice, called vesou, runs off to the boiling house. Until abolition in 1848, this was the work of enslaved people.

Habitation Murat, in Grand-Bourg

This is the most complete site. Dominique Murat bought the estate in 1807; his son built the windmill, dated 1814, then a neoclassical great house still known as “the château”. In 1839, 307 people were enslaved here: it was one of the largest sugar estates in Guadeloupe. Since 1979 the Département has run the Marie-Galante ecomuseum here: the mill tower, a listed historic monument, the ruins of the sugar works, an exhibition in the great house and a garden of medicinal plants.

The Bézard mill, in Capesterre

It stands one kilometer from the Bellevue distillery. Built around 1840, it crushed cane with three cast-iron rollers set outside the tower, an unusual arrangement. It stopped working around 1920, lost its roof and sails to the 1956 hurricane, has been a registered historic monument since 1979 and was first restored in the mid-1990s as a training project. Left unmaintained afterwards, it is now being restored again: the tourist office announces its reopening for November 2026 (tourist office page, in French).

More towers, more ruins

At the Bellevue distillery, the 1821 windmill can be visited freely in the morning. Just outside Grand-Bourg on the way to Saint-Louis, Habitation Roussel-Trianon brings together a windmill from 1800, large stone stables and the chimney of a steam-powered factory: listed ruins, open to all. Elsewhere, overgrown towers dot the inland roads.

From windmill to factory

Steam spelled the end of the windmills. The Grande-Anse factory, founded in 1845, took over; the island’s last working windmill, at Grand-Pierre, stopped in 1941, and since 1959 Grande-Anse has been the only sugar factory on Marie-Galante. Cane itself never left the landscape: it still covers more than 2,000 hectares and supplies the island’s three distilleries.