page_title: History of Cape Verde
section_title: 20th century
hierarchical_section_title: History of Cape Verde / Portuguese discovery and colonisation / 20th century
caption_attribution_description: English: View of the Port of Praia, 1936
context_page_description: The recorded history of Cape Verde begins with Portuguese discovery in 1456. Possible early references go back around 2000 years.
context_section_description: At the end of the 19th century, with the advent of the ocean liner, the island's position astride Atlantic shipping lanes made Cape Verde an ideal location for resupplying ships with fuel (imported coal), water and livestock. Because of its excellent harbour, Mindelo (on the island of São Vicente) became an important commercial centre during the 19th century, mainly because the British used Cape Verde as a storage depot for coal which was bound for the Americas. The harbour area at Mindelo was developed by the British for this purpose.
  The island was made a coaling and submarine cable station, and there was plenty of work for local labourers. This was the golden period of the city, where it gained the cultural characteristics that made it the current cultural capital of the country. 
  During World War II, the economy collapsed as the shipping traffic was drastically reduced. As the British coal industry went into decline in the 1980s, this source of income dried up, and Britain had to abandon its Cape Verdean interests — which ended up being the final strike to the highly dependent local economy.
  During World War II, British ships were stationed in Mindelo, later with Winston Churchill's interest in Cape Verde, in April 1941, thousands of troops were stationed on the island. 
  The famine in the nation worsened and struck when World War II was happening outside the Portuguese Empire between 1941 and 1942 and a second one from 1946 to 1948, it led to emigration of tens of thousands to Europe, some left to Senegal and São Tomé and Príncipe.
  Espargos in the middle of the island was founded in the mid 20th century, it was founded in the late 1940s as an airport town, the last in the Portuguese era, in 1950, a number of flights rose, first Alitalia, then the Portuguese-Brazilian Friendship flight and South Africa Airways (SAA) in 1967 with the flights in London, the airline had to use the airport due to the international boycott of apartheid at the time.  The last eruption in the colonial era was at Pico do Fogo in 1951 and was a small one.
  In 1952, the Portuguese government planned to transfer over 10,000 settlers to the island of São Tomé in São Tomé and Príncipe, another Portuguese colony, to work in plantations instead of the Forros.  Africans would come mainly from the islands of São Nicolau, Santiago, Santo Antão, Fogo and Brava.  During the time that the two colonies became independent, many left to Europe and the United States, a few returned to Cape Verde, after, the Cape Verdean population would be moved to the nearby island of Príncipe, many Cape Verdean descendants, some with another descendant became elemented into the Príncipe Creole society.
  In the lead-up to and during the Portuguese Colonial War, those planning and fighting in the armed conflict in Portuguese Guinea often linked the goal of liberation of Guinea-Bissau to the goal of liberation in Cape Verde. (For instance, in 1956, Amílcar and Luís Cabral founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde.)
caption: Praia and the locality of Gamboa or Cha das Aldeias in 1936
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