Cape VerdeCabo Verde

The archipelago rose from the Atlantic floor over a hotspot, like the Canaries to the north. The islands fall into two groups by the trade winds: Barlavento (windward) in the north — Santo Antão, São Vicente, Santa Luzia, São Nicolau, Sal and Boa Vista — and Sotavento (leeward) in the south — Maio, Santiago, Fogo and Brava. Santa Luzia is uninhabited.

The eastern islands, Sal, Boa Vista and Maio, are old and worn flat: sand, salt pans and dunes blown from the Sahara. The western and southern islands are young and steep. Fogo is still active, its 2,829 m cone rising from a crater nine kilometres wide; the eruption of 2014–15 buried most of the village of Chã das Caldeiras, which residents have rebuilt on the fresh lava.

Rain is the country's constraint. The Sahel climate brings only a short, unreliable rainy season around August–October, and droughts shaped its history. Where the northeast trades hit high ground, on Santo Antão and parts of Santiago and Fogo, cloud and mist water terraced valleys of sugar cane, bananas and maize; elsewhere the land is brown most of the year and water comes from desalination plants.

The sea is rich. Loggerhead turtles nest on Boa Vista and Sal in one of the largest rookeries in the Atlantic; humpback whales come to breed off Boa Vista in spring; and the Cape Verde shearwater and other seabirds breed on the cliffs.

Portuguese and Genoese navigators reached the islands around 1456–1462 and found them empty. Ribeira Grande, on Santiago's south coast, was founded in 1462 and became the first European colonial town in the tropics. Its purpose was trade: Africans captured on the Guinea coast were brought here, baptised, sometimes put to work on cotton and sugar, and sold on to Europe and later the Americas.

The town grew rich in the 16th century, with a cathedral, a Franciscan convent and the fortress of São Filipe above it. Cloth woven by enslaved people on Santiago — panu di terra — became a currency on the African coast. Sir Francis Drake raided Ribeira Grande in 1585, and French privateers sacked it in 1712; the capital moved to Praia, and the old town, now Cidade Velha, declined.

From this mixing of Portuguese settlers, African captives and their descendants came Crioulo society and the Kriolu language. The badiu culture of Santiago's interior, descended from runaway and freed slaves, kept African traditions such as batuku drumming and the tabanka processions most strongly.

From the 18th to the mid-20th century, repeated droughts brought famines that killed large parts of the population — tens of thousands died in the 1940s alone — while the colonial government did little. People left: on American whaling ships from the 18th century, which recruited on Brava and Fogo, to New England; as contract labourers to the cocoa plantations of São Tomé; and later to Portugal, the Netherlands, France and elsewhere.

Today more Cape Verdeans and their descendants live abroad than on the islands, with large communities in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, Lisbon, Rotterdam and Paris. Remittances pay for houses, schools and weddings, and the diaspora votes in national elections. The theme of departure, sodade — longing for what is far away — runs through the country's music and writing.

Mindelo on São Vicente grew in the 19th century as a British coaling station for steamships crossing the Atlantic, bringing a cosmopolitan culture, English words in Kriolu, cricket and the first football on the islands. When coal gave way to oil, Mindelo turned to music and culture instead.

Amílcar Cabral, an agronomist born in Guinea-Bissau to Cape Verdean parents, founded the PAIGC in 1956 to win independence for both territories. The armed struggle was fought in Guinea's forests; Cape Verdeans were jailed in the Tarrafal camp on Santiago, which Portugal's dictatorship used for political prisoners. Cabral was assassinated in Conakry in January 1973, months before Guinea-Bissau declared independence.

After Portugal's 1974 revolution, Cape Verde became independent on 5 July 1975 under the PAIGC, with a plan to unite with Guinea-Bissau. A coup in Bissau in 1980 ended that, and the Cape Verdean branch became the PAICV, ruling as a single party.

In 1990–91 Cape Verde moved peacefully to multiparty democracy, and the Movement for Democracy (MpD) won the first free elections. Since then power has alternated between MpD and PAICV through elections that observers have judged free. The country graduated from least-developed status in 2007, built its economy on tourism, and was certified malaria-free by the WHO in 2024.

Music is the country's best-known export. Morna, slow and melancholy, sung in Kriolu about love, the sea and sodade, took shape on Boa Vista and Brava in the 19th century; the poet-composer Eugénio Tavares gave it its classic form, and B. Leza added Brazilian-style harmonies in Mindelo. Cesária Évora, the 'barefoot diva' from Mindelo, took morna to the world from the 1990s, and UNESCO listed it as intangible heritage in 2019.

Coladeira is morna's faster, danceable cousin. Funaná, accordion-and-scraper dance music from Santiago's interior, was frowned on by the colonial authorities and exploded after independence with bands like Bulimundo and Ferro Gaita. Batuku, drummed on cloth by women in a circle, is Santiago's oldest form.

Carnival in Mindelo, with its samba-school-style groups, is the biggest party of the year, and music festivals at Baía das Gatas (August) and Gamboa in Praia draw crowds. Writers of the Claridade movement of the 1930s, and later Germano Almeida, gave the islands a literature in Portuguese about Creole life.

Cachupa is the national dish: hominy maize and several kinds of beans cooked slowly with vegetables and whatever meat or fish is available. Cachupa pobre is the everyday version, cachupa rica the festival one with pork, sausage and chicken. The next morning it is fried with an egg on top as cachupa guisada. Its ingredients tell the history: maize from the Americas, beans from Africa, pork from Portugal.

The sea supplies tuna, wahoo, grouper, octopus, lobster and búzio (sea snail). Goat's cheese, especially from Santo Antão and Fogo, is served with papaya or guava jam; pudim de queijo is its dessert form. Fogo grows wine and coffee inside its crater, sold as Vinho do Fogo and Café do Fogo.

Grogue, distilled from sugar cane crushed in wooden or ox-driven presses (trapiches), is the national spirit, mostly from Santo Antão and Santiago; ponche adds honey or molasses. Strela is the local beer. At home and in the countryside, food and drink are shared generously, and a visitor is fed first.