Mindelo

Mindelo is the port that made Cabo Verde sing: on São Vicente, an island of bare brown mountains, the British made a coaling station in the nineteenth century in the sunken crater of Porto Grande — one of the finest natural harbours in the Atlantic, with the profile of Monte Cara, the giant's face, across the water — and the sailors, the coal, the telegraph cable and the cosmopolitan boredom of a mid-ocean stop bred the mornas that Cesária Évora carried barefoot to the world. The city has kept the look of that era: the pastel houses and the Rua de Lisboa, the Palácio do Povo, the fish market and the covered market full of Santo Antão's fruit, a replica of Lisbon's Torre de Belém on the waterfront, the Praça Nova where the town walks in the evening, the little Fortim d'El Rei on its hill, and Laginha, a turquoise city beach at the northern end of the bay. In February it stages the most Brazilian carnival in Africa; in August the full moon brings the festival of Baía das Gatas to a beach across the island.

The traveller comes by the short flight from Praia or Sal to the airport named after Cesária, or on the ferry from Santo Antão across the channel, and gives the city its rhythm: the fish market early and the covered market after, a coffee on the Praça Nova, the Torre de Belém and the Palácio do Povo, the house where Cesária lived; the afternoon at Laginha with the swimmers and the kids, or on the wind at São Pedro, where the kitesurfers fly under the landing planes; the evening on the Rua de Lisboa, where the bars fill and, around midnight, someone always begins a morna and everyone knows the words; a day up Monte Verde for the mist and the view of the whole bay; and, essentially, the ferry to Santo Antão at dawn — an hour across the channel and into the green — because Mindelo is the door to that island as much as a city of its own.

The Guide's honesty: Mindelo is a port town, easy and unpretentious, and it is at its best at night — the days can be windy, dusty and slow, and the island around it is a desert of stone; the carnival week and the Baía das Gatas weekend fill every bed months ahead — book or come another week; the wind blows hard from November to June, which is a joy for São Pedro and a nuisance for a beach towel; the music is real and it happens late, in small bars and on the terraces, not on a schedule; taxis and aluguers are cheap and the town is walkable; the ferry to Santo Antão is the best thing to do from here and the channel can be rough — sit at the back; and grogue is stronger than it tastes, and served with a smile that expects a second.