Islands in the Sun

11 March 2007 - The Sunday Telegraph - Robert Nurden

Our rickety van moaned and shuddered as it snaked its way up the side of the volcano. Below us lay Porto Novo, where we'd disembarked half an hour earlier, already a white fragment against the deep blue of the Atlantic. All around us on the hill were bare earth and the vestiges of terraces, where vegetables had once grown but now lay scorched brown under a relentless sun. "I remember when maize and cassava grew here and we got several crops a year," said Julio, our guide. "But now it gets hardly any rain and the desert is expanding." He didn't seem unduly perturbed by this apocalyptic scenario; in fact he was grinning. Clearly there was more to the climate of Santo Antão, the most westerly island of Cape Verde's necklace-shaped archipelago, than first impressions suggested.

After we'd spent another 20 minutes climbing, the landscape began to provide hints of what lay beyond. Patches of Scotch pine and acacia, dotted along the 5,000 ft ridge that splits the island in half, started to appear. Our van jolted to a halt and Julio got out. We followed him to the edge of a precipice, the side of a huge caldera that plunged a thousand feet. Now we could see farm buildings and tiny figures bending over crops. After the wasteland behind us, this was a picture of abundance. We'd never seen such a sudden change in a landscape.

Julio, smiling at the amazement on the faces of yet another group of visitors, explained: "The wind comes from the west bringing moisture, which meets the mountains and forms clouds. But because the mountains are so high the clouds become trapped and all the rain falls on the west side and never reaches the east." We weren't surprised to learn that his other job was teaching.

Back in the van, and now under a thick canopy of vegetation, we crawled along a ribbon of asphalt into a world of tortured lava, in which Gaudíesque outcrops of rock shook misshapen fists at the sky. Wherever we looked there were ridges and ledges of bent and twisted volcanic sculpture. On either side, beneath these petrified streams of lava, canyons dropped away to plantations of beans, tomatoes, orange trees, chillies, maize and sweet potato. This is where the farmers of Santa Antão live, some still in traditional sugar cane huts. It is also Cape Verde's fruit and vegetable bowl, and every morning trucks stop to pick up the produce for the market on the neighbouring island of São Vicente. The land looked and felt like the Caribbean. Even the language - Creole - was similar, though here Portuguese was the dominant European element. At one point, on the way down to Ribeira Grande on the other side of the island, the road narrowed further to thread its way, trapeze-like, along a slender spine of lava. To the left and right twin ravines, giant aloe vera plants at their summits, dropped to the valley floor.

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