Cidade Velha

You drive to Cidade Velha along a road that drops out of Praia’s suburban sprawl and then keeps descending south until the valley opens up and you are suddenly somewhere else — older, quieter, carrying a weight of history that arrives before the signposts do. I pulled off the road at a viewpoint above the town and stayed there for twenty minutes before descending. Below, a cluster of whitewashed buildings followed a narrow street down to the sea. Above the town, on the ridge, the remains of the Forte Real de São Filipe surveyed everything with the exhausted authority of a structure that has been watching this coast for five hundred years.

Cidade Velha — Old City, formerly Ribeira Grande — was the first European colonial city built in the tropics. It was established in the 1460s by Portuguese navigators using Santiago as a waystation for the Atlantic slave trade. Ships came from West Africa loaded with people and left from here loaded with sugar and then again with people. The trade made the city rich for a century before the trade routes shifted and the pirates came — Sir Francis Drake sacked it twice — and then the capital moved to Praia and Ribeira Grande contracted into the village it is today.

The cathedral of Nossa Senhora do Rosário is the oldest European church building in the tropics still standing, which is a sentence that requires a moment to process. What stands is essentially a skeleton — the nave walls, the arched doorways, the sense of scale — roofless, the sky coming in. I walked through it slowly, stepping over the place where the floor used to be, and thought about all the centuries of weather that had been slowly completing what the pirates had started. Weeds grow between the stones with no particular hurry.

The Pillory — the pelourinho — stands in the square near the waterfront. It is a stone column, octagonal, elaborately carved, and it is where enslaved people were publicly punished and where the power of the colonial state was made visible and legible to everyone who passed. It stands there now in the afternoon light without explanation or apology, just a stone object in a square, and it is one of the most affecting things I have encountered on my travels — not because of what it says but because of what it does not need to say.

I climbed to the fort in the late afternoon. The view from the walls takes in the whole of the bay and, on a clear day, the next island. A woman was selling coconuts outside the gate. Inside, the fort is empty and open and the wind moves through it with no particular respect for what it is. I sat on the old ramparts until the light started to go, then walked back down through the village, which by that hour was returning to itself — children, washing on lines, the smell of dinner through an open window. The UNESCO designation and the tourist signs had not yet reached this hour of the day.

When to go: November through June, when Santiago is dry and the light is clear. The valley above Cidade Velha retains colour year-round but the fortress is best visited late afternoon when the angle of the light makes the stone walls come alive. The walk between Praia and Cidade Velha along the coast road (about 15 km) is one of the island’s best if you have the legs and the water.