Mindelo, Sao Vincente, Cape Verde Islands

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Due to go to São Tiago rather than São Vicente our destination was changed for unspecified reasons, but it probably made little difference. São Vicente (Portuguese for "Saint Vincent") is one of the Barlavento Islands, the northern group within the Cape Verde archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean, off the west African coast. It is located between the islands of Santo Antão and Santa Luzia, with the Canal de São Vicente separating it from Santo Antão. The capital of the island is Mindelo and over 92% of the population of the island live in the Greater Mindelo urban area.

We had been advised that Cape Verde was an 'up and coming' holiday destination, however, we have serious doubts about this; at least for the next ten years. The upside is the island has a feel of Brazil about it. This is mainly manifest in the Portuguese culture and the local citizenry which is essentially black African, but with people more from the Sahel region (Northern Sudan) than West Africa who are tall and thin and very good looking. Nobody was overweight (unlike us) and everyone was very friendly.

Mindelo had far more infrastructure than we expected, but is not up to the standards of Madeira, let alone metropolitan Portugal. There were no tourist facilities and residential holiday developments are only just getting off the ground. Most everything needs to be imported and essentially, these islands are yet more volcanic rocks, mainly lunar in appearance. The limiting factor for development will be water availability. Yet, we quite liked the town. It was comfortable with itself and hardly tuned to tourism at all. There were some Senegalese street salesman and one or two shops selling African artifacts, but none of the timeshare salesmen of which we were told to beware.
In truth, there was little to do except post the blogs and wander around, which we did. We found a pleasant commercial development with an internal courtyard where we sat down and enjoyed a beer. We were only in Cape Verde for a few hours, but there was no reason to stay much longer.

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