Sao Vicente was the last island to be colonised by the Portuguese, who were looking for fertile land to increase agricultural production. Here they founded the town of Mindelo in the 19th century, populating it with the last slaves and new generations of Creole mestizos. Today, the brightly coloured, Portuguese-style colonial buildings provide the backdrop for one of the country’s richest cultural lives and host Cape Verde’s oldest and most colourful carnivals.
Like the famous Rio Carnival, Mindelo’s Carnival originated from the Portuguese festival of Entrudo, which was celebrated between Epiphany and the beginning of Lent.
While today this tradition is also perpetuated on the island of Sao Nicolau, in a more intimate version, in Sao Vicente, it becomes an explosive and highly competitive event, comparable to the Brazilian one.
Each district presents a theme and handcrafts its own floats and costumes, within committees that have to watch over the highly secret construction of the monumental sets for months.
On Shrove Tuesday, the streets of Mindelo come alive with festivity and the competition begins, with parades of floats to the sound of Cape Verdean music, merriment and wild dancing. The city fills up with indescribable atmospheres, in a mixture of chaotic noise, joy and morabeza. One forgets one’s troubles and gets out of one’s routine, in every sense of the word, by dressing up and playing other roles, like an actor, in a sort of cathartic festive and collective release, always present in the Cape Verdean soul, but which reaches its peak during the carnival parades.
The streets fill up, the bars explode, rivers of grogue, the sugar cane distillate similar to rum, flow. Children, the elderly and the young flock to the heart of Mindelo in an unparalleled participatory festival that welcomes people from all the Cape Verdean islands and foreign tourists from everywhere.
But Sao Vicente, the small island of Barlavento (Sotavento) does not only come alive during Carnival. Mindelo is always buzzing. It is a city of culture and music, the home of Cesaria Evora, who brought the traditional melodies of morna to the world stage and made it a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
In the streets and clubs, at all hours of the day, people play ourin (a kind of traditional checkers, also called awale in sub-Saharan Africa) and eat cachupa, the national dish made with corn, pork, manioc, potatoes, vegetables and fish. Music and grogue are played and drunk everywhere until dawn, and the markets are filled with a riot of fresh fish and produce, because in Sao Vicente, as on the neighbouring islands of Santo Antao and Sao Nicolau, while the landscape retains an arid desert look, with lunar scenes typical of dark, arid volcanic lands, the valleys and inland slopes remain fertile and productive. Sao Vicente is also the island of the white beaches of Sao Pedro and Calhau, inhabited by loggerhead turtles, of the golden sandy bays of Praia Grande that suddenly open up between the incredible architectural backdrops of Monte Verde, in breathtaking and surreal volcanic settings.
It is the island of water sports in Baia das Gatas, of fishy seas and traditional boats, handmade in Salamansa, that set sail every day from Cape Verde’s busiest port, in the shadow of the Tower of Belem, a miniature copy of Lisbon’s famous monument, a sign of the Portuguese presence on the island in past centuries, and which persists in a mixed lineage that has become the true Cape Verdean Creole identity.
