Annobón

Annobón sits alone in the Atlantic roughly six hundred kilometers southwest of the Equatoguinean mainland, further from the rest of the country than the rest of the country is from Cameroon. Reaching it requires either a charter flight or a sea passage that the residents of the island take with a matter-of-factness that speaks to generations of living at this distance from anything. I arrived by small plane that made the crossing in a manner that the pilot clearly found routine and that I found fairly dramatic, the Atlantic stretching in every direction below us until the island appeared: a small volcanic mass, impossibly green, rising from the ocean without preamble.

The island’s proper name is Annobón, though residents still call it Pagalu, from the Portuguese pagalu meaning “peacock” — a remnant of its earliest colonial history as a Portuguese-controlled waypoint that predates Spanish rule by centuries. The language spoken here is Fa d’Ambô, a Portuguese creole that the island developed in isolation and that is mutually unintelligible with anything else on Earth, including modern Portuguese. When I tried my Spanish, people were patient with me. When I tried my French — the same. When they spoke Fa d’Ambô among themselves, I was simply a visitor in someone else’s conversation, which is a fine place to be.

The island’s one real settlement is San Antonio de Palé, a town arranged on a slope above the main beach. The houses are painted in faded colors — terracotta and blue and yellow — and the colonial church at the top of the slope has a bell tower that is visible from the water on the approach. The beach below is dark volcanic sand, the surf calmer on the western side where the town sits, protected from the open Atlantic swell. Children play in the shallows with the focus of children who have very few options and have maximized all of them.

I walked the island’s perimeter trail over two days. Annobón is small enough — roughly seventeen square kilometers — that this is entirely possible, but the terrain is volcanic and steep and the vegetation dense enough that the trail disappears in places into undergrowth that requires some negotiation. The interior, which I glimpsed from ridgelines, is forest — proper forest, dense and dark and unentered by most visitors, whatever rare visitors there are. Crater lakes occupy the island’s volcanic vents. One of them, Lake Adriana, sits in a crater rim at the island’s northern end and reflects the sky with a clarity I found almost disturbing, as if something important was being demonstrated about mirrors.

The fishing in the waters around Annobón is extraordinary — the deep Atlantic current that swings close to the island brings pelagic fish in numbers that make the island’s economy possible. I ate yellowfin tuna two nights running, prepared simply with garlic and a local pepper, and it was some of the best fish I have eaten anywhere. The cook, a woman who ran what functioned as the island’s closest thing to a restaurant from the front room of her house, watched me eat with the satisfied expression of someone who knows something tastes good and does not need the compliment.

There is a quality to the light on Annobón in the afternoon — the equatorial sun filtered through Atlantic haze, landing on white-painted walls and volcanic rock and dark water — that is unlike anything I have encountered on the mainland or on Bioko. It is the light of a place that has worked out its own relationship with everything, including sunshine.

When to go: June through September offers the most reliable flying conditions and calmer seas for any boat approach. The island is warm year-round but the dry months are more comfortable for walking the perimeter trail. Book any transport and accommodation — which is extremely limited — well in advance through contacts in Malabo.