Uninhabited Atlantic isles became Africa’s stable island republic
Cape Verde is a horseshoe of ten volcanic islands in the Atlantic, some 600 to 850 kilometres west of Dakar, that nobody lived on until the Portuguese arrived in the fifteenth century. Their settlement at Ribeira Grande, founded in 1462, was the first permanent European town in the tropics.
The islands total about 4,033 square kilometres and belong to the Macaronesia ecoregion with the Azores and Canaries. Nine are inhabited, grouped into windward Barlavento and leeward Sotavento chains. Sal, Boa Vista and Maio are flat, sandy and dry, the rest rockier and greener. The name comes from Cap-Vert, the green cape in Senegal that Portuguese sailors named in 1444, and in 2013 the government asked the UN to use only Cabo Verde officially.
Around 530,000 people live there, mostly of West African descent with Portuguese ancestry mixed in. Portuguese is official, but nearly everyone speaks Cape Verdean Creole. Santiago, the largest island, had 269,370 people in the 2021 census and holds the capital, Praia. The islands grew rich in the sixteenth century on the Atlantic slave trade; Francis Drake sacked Ribeira Grande twice in 1585, and Praia took over as capital in 1770.
When the slave trade faded in the nineteenth century, ships refuelling on mid-Atlantic routes kept the port of Mindelo on São Vicente busy, and in 1832 the islands were the first stop of Charles Darwin's voyage on HMS Beagle. Portugal relabelled the colony an overseas province in 1951 to dampen nationalism. Amílcar Cabral co-founded the PAIGC in 1956 to seek independence for Cape Verde and Portuguese Guinea, but he was assassinated in 1973.
After Portugal's revolution of April 1974, an elected National Assembly received independence on 5 July 1975. The country has been a stable multiparty democracy since the early 1990s and in 2026 ranked joint second in Africa on V-Dem's electoral democracy score. With few natural resources it relies on services and tourism, and on 2 February 2024 it became the third African nation certified free of malaria.
Source: Cape Verde
