Just six hours from Britain lies a relatively undiscovered collection of sunny islands. Lying 450km off the West African Atlantic coastline, Cape Verde consists of ten tiny volcanic islands which are set to become the next big winter sun destination thanks to the launch of direct flights from London and Manchester.
The Cape Verde islands may send you scrabbling for an atlas but get used to the name. They are threatening to be the new big thing, to the point where they are being lauded as the "new Caribbean".
New flights from Britain, which take around six hours, land o the island of Sal, which is leading this tourism boom. Its year-round warmth and paradisiacal white sand beaches have seen holiday resorts mushroom.
Tet Sal is pancake-flat and barren. so to really appreciate Cape Verde's crumbling colonial cities, dramatic vistas and Creole culture, you need to island hop, and an excellent domestic air service ensures three or four of them can be comfortably seen in a week.
Santiago is the largest island, hosting half of Cape Verde's 475000 inhabitants. The nation was born here in 1460 when the navigator Antonio de Noli claimed the islands for Portugal. The first settlement, Ribeira Grande, is now a historical monument. Defending the settlement is a square fort, cannons still pointing into the Alantic. Yet it was of little use protecting against marauding pirates.
Cultural mix
Locals will tell you they are Africans with a European outlook, although this union has been fraught. Most sinisterly, Ribeira Grande's main plaza retains a gibbet where the Portuguese once hanged their slaves.
Mindelo city, on Sao Vicente island, best captures Cape Verde's Creole mood. It is very pretty. Facades of limegreen and sky-blue colonial buildings are arranged around a semi-circular deepwater harbour and children splash all day in the city beach's creamy surf.
But to glimpse inside the Cape Verdean soul, sampling Mindelo's nocturnal cuisine and music is essential. The gastronomy is an Afro-European fusion based around seafood. A local dish worth tasting is cachupa: a bean stew with vegetables and meat.
After midnight, Mindelo resonates to the rhythmic drumming of slave inspired Funana and zouk, an import from the French Antilles, danced intimately toe-to-toe by couples. Musically, Cape Verde is best known for the soulful ballads of morna: most notably sung by the internationally acclaimed Cesaria Evora.
Looming across Mindelo's harbour is the shadowy massif of Santo Antao. Just an hour's ferry away, this is Cape Verde's most beautiful island. Don't be fooled by the parched outer slopes of its volcanic complex, the interior is verdant and fertile. It is a walker's paradise. The ribeiras (valleys) sweep away in black-soil terraces of maize and almond tres, plummeting sometimes more than a kilometre towards pinprick hamlets at the valley bottoms.
Of particular interest are the sugar cane plantations. Santo Antao produces Cape Verde's mulekicking cane spirit, grog. At Senor Silva's sugar mill, visitors can call into his courtyard where his family has distilled it for 400 years. An ox-driven wooden press resembling a medieval torture-rack pulps the sugar cane and tarste-test grog in its more palatable form: sweetened with cane honey to make a moreish concoction called ponch.
Fiery origins
Only Fogo Island outdoes Santo Antao for drama. Fogo's active volcano towers above the sea: testament to the fiery origins of the whole archipelago. Despite eruptions in 1951 and 1995, the villagers of Cha das Caldeiras stubbornly remain living inside Fogo's mammoth crater, tending their grapevines in the thick basalt ash amid a mooscape of tumbled black lava-flows and prevailing wafts of sulphur.
If you do make the blistering four-hour ascent to the highest point of the volcano (2800m), the reward is breathtaking views. Gazing out over the Atlantic, it is easy to wonder just when and where the next cone might burst from the sea to add yet another diverse landscape to these already exotic little isles.
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