CAPE VERDE
dolphins and whales: “All different whales. If you see a ‘pschew!’, you’ve seen whales,” he’d said, imitating the sound of a spout. I stare hard. There’s a brown shape that might be a turtle — loggerheads, in particular, frequent these waters — but the sea is like a herd of white horses, making anything else hard to discern. A little further on, I stumble into Aranhas. The name
means ‘spider’ — apt for this now-abandoned village, given over to insects, milkweed and Iago sparrows. The ruined houses, some still standing, some slumped and spewed, are blending into the surrounding valley. Incredibly, amid this formidable landscape of rumpled rock, I can still make out the former agricultural terraces, likely unfarmed for decades but enduring still.
Above from left: Views over the mountains south of Cruzinha; farmer Juan Bautista on the Ribeira das Patas
Waiting for the rain My final walk, two days later, is an eight-mile loop along the Ribeira das Patas, on the island’s southeast coast. Early-morning sun is sneaking into the wide valley’s dark, dry fissures as I stare at the fearsome Bordeira do Norte, a seemingly impenetrable wall of rock. But, somehow, there’s a track, and I’m soon zigzagging up sheer slopes of volcanic sand and stone, inching along dizzying precipices. The valley spreads below, the sea is lost to the haze beyond. To one side, clouds surge over the Alto Mira pass like a tidal wave; to the other, the path scrapes across rock streaked with shades of orange. It’s only thanks to a set of figures on the trail in the distance — farmers leading donkeys — that I can make out which way I’m supposed to go.
The route continues past formations of granular
pumice stone, through a small canyon and into a scattered community, where a few souls work parched terraces growing beans and corn. It’s here I meet Juan Bautista, who’s tending to his donkeys: one brays a welcome, another rolls gleefully in the dust. Juan is keen to chat and, although I don’t understand his Kriolu, he conveys a little about his life. He shows me his simple house, the herbs he brews into tea and the corn he’s harvested. As he speaks, two kittens chase wind-blown husks in the yard. These are Juan’s day-to-day companions. Through snatched words, sign language and deduction, I work out his family, including three children, live elsewhere on the islands. This lunar-like landscape of crusted lava flows and dry
riverbeds, with views across to 6,493ft Tope de Coroa, Santo Antão’s highest peak, makes good hiking country. But life here can be harsh. The islands of Cape Verde can go for very long stretches without rain. In the 1940s, around 45,000 people — equivalent to the entire population of Santo Antão today — died as a result of drought; thousands more were driven to emigrate. A classic of Cape Verdean literature, Manuel Lopes’s 1960 novel Os Flagelados do Vento Leste (‘The Victims of the East Wind’), describes the struggle of surviving in this very valley when the rains
don’t come. Lopes, who lived in Ribeira das Patas for some time, wrote about the steep, hairpin path along which I’m hiking, which connects the uplands to the valley; the treacherous route was heavily used by locals during the famine-ravaged years.
JUL/AUG 2024 109
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84 |
Page 85 |
Page 86 |
Page 87 |
Page 88 |
Page 89 |
Page 90 |
Page 91 |
Page 92 |
Page 93 |
Page 94 |
Page 95 |
Page 96 |
Page 97 |
Page 98 |
Page 99 |
Page 100 |
Page 101 |
Page 102 |
Page 103 |
Page 104 |
Page 105 |
Page 106 |
Page 107 |
Page 108 |
Page 109 |
Page 110 |
Page 111 |
Page 112 |
Page 113 |
Page 114 |
Page 115 |
Page 116 |
Page 117 |
Page 118 |
Page 119 |
Page 120 |
Page 121 |
Page 122 |
Page 123 |
Page 124 |
Page 125 |
Page 126 |
Page 127 |
Page 128 |
Page 129 |
Page 130 |
Page 131 |
Page 132 |
Page 133 |
Page 134 |
Page 135 |
Page 136 |
Page 137 |
Page 138 |
Page 139 |
Page 140 |
Page 141 |
Page 142 |
Page 143 |
Page 144 |
Page 145 |
Page 146 |
Page 147 |
Page 148 |
Page 149 |
Page 150 |
Page 151 |
Page 152 |
Page 153 |
Page 154 |
Page 155 |
Page 156 |
Page 157 |
Page 158 |
Page 159 |
Page 160 |
Page 161 |
Page 162 |
Page 163 |
Page 164 |
Page 165 |
Page 166 |
Page 167 |
Page 168 |
Page 169 |
Page 170 |
Page 171 |
Page 172 |
Page 173 |
Page 174 |
Page 175 |
Page 176 |
Page 177 |
Page 178 |
Page 179 |
Page 180 |
Page 181 |
Page 182 |
Page 183 |
Page 184 |
Page 185 |
Page 186 |
Page 187 |
Page 188 |
Page 189 |
Page 190 |
Page 191 |
Page 192 |
Page 193 |
Page 194 |
Page 195 |
Page 196
