We don t mind rough traveloling, but you have to be prepared, Kraatari says. They brought slaves from West Africa to carry out the hard labour of making these uninhabited islands habitable and to work on cotton plantations. Within a few years Cape Verde, then one of Portugal s five African colonies, began to prosper as a convenient staging post for the flourishing trans-Atlantic slave trade. For more than three centuries West African natives were captured and brought to these islands for sale to European slavers who took them to the New World. Now it is a ramshackle town, 10km west of the capital Praia, at the mouth of a lush valley where a few thousand people live off fishing and subsistence farming.
Naked children spill from doorless one-room houses and sprint to the beach.
Scrawny dogs nap in the shade, twitching their ears to shake off flies, goats nibble at leaves, and black pigs meander down the cobbled streets. The old buildings are in ruins. The roofless Sao Francisco convent is partly concealed beneath fast-growing tropical vegetation. Only the thick walls of the seafront Roman Catholic cathedral, destroyed by cannon fire from pirate ships, still stand. At the Nossa Senhora de Rosario church, built by slaves, two faded gravestones carry the years 1604 and 1611.