On a cool, mellow evening in the mountains of Santiago, the largest island in the Cape Verde archipelago, Lindorfo, our host, was rhapsodising about hot tubs. “I’ve been looking them up on the internet,” he said. “I think my guests would love relaxing in one, under a sky like this. Just look at all those stars!”

Lindorfo, a trained agronomist and self-taught wine expert and astronomer, was born in these mountains. Having worked in Bulgaria, Belgium and Italy, he recently came back to Santiago to build a pousada (a Portuguese-style hotel). It’s proving so popular that he has big plans for the place.

For someone from a nation whose residents are far outnumbered by their relatives abroad, Lindorfo has gone against the flow by returning to his roots. But it’s easy to see why rural Santiago drew him home. Looking for all the world like the haunt of giants, dragons and trolls, the landscape is a dramatic, vertiginous collage of pinnacles and ridges, made lush by banana plants, maize and wild aloe vera. Winding their way between the crags are perilous-looking donkey paths, some with a sheer drop on either side.

To be honest, I hadn’t expected this. I’d imagined sun-baked remnants of Portuguese colonial buildings, hot, dimly lit front-room bars with scrubbed tables and grizzled guitarists playing deliciously melancholy morna ballads. And I’d been looking forward to the huge, empty beaches, endless sunshine and laid-back Afro-Brazilian vibe promised so seductively by tour operators and property agents who tout the islands as the planet’s hottest new destination. But cool, green mountains, coronary-inducing donkey paths and hot tubs bought over the internet?

Cape Verde is full of surprises. Scattered like pebbles 400 miles west of Dakar, this island cluster has a topography, climate and mood that is utterly unlike anywhere else in Africa. Its fiercely volcanic landscapes – some long-eroded, some still bubbling with sulphur and fire – seem worlds apart from the flat, arid scrub of the Sahel. Some compare the islands to their northern neighbours, the Canaries, as they were before the cement mixers moved in. So far, development has been patchy and slow, though it’s set to change.

First colonised in the 1500s, Cape Verde has been a travellers’ stopover for centuries: slavers serviced their galleys here in the 18th Century, the British came here in the 19th Century to run coaling stations for the Atlantic steamships, and during the apartheid era South African pilots, for want of other options, used the islands as a refuelling stop. In the 1990s, Cape Verde began to feature on holiday itineraries, with young European windsurfers leading the way.

Culturally, Cape Verde is unique. While most West African lives are underpinned by a distinctively African blend of Islam and animism, the majority of Cape Verdeans are Catholic mestizos with an outlook that’s as focused on Europe as on the mainland. Krioulo, the language of the southern islands and Crioulo, spoken in the north, are based on colonial-era Portuguese with a few English and West African words thrown in; both are powerful indicators of national identity. But hard as we try to define what most sets Cape Verde apart from its neighbours, this nation defies generalisations, so different is each island from the next.

Many visitors to Cape Verde stick to the island of Sal, basing themselves in Santa Maria, the country’s only real resort. It’s rarely love at first sight. From the air, Sal looks like a barren slab, and it’s scarcely more appealing at ground level. Nothing seems to grow in the salty, rubble-strewn interior apart from withered acacias, bent double by the wind. The weathered cones of long-dead volcanoes define the landscape. But the fine beaches to the south are great for watersports, and developers view Sal not as desert, but as a blank canvas.

In Santa Maria, you’re never far from the rumble of a construction site. Once little more than a shantytown, the area is changing as the shiny new villas and apartments advertised at European property shows make the transition from artist’s impression into reality. In the Italian restaurants and Irish bars, you’re as likely to bump into second-home buyers as tourists. Now that you can fly direct to Sal from Gatwick and Manchester, many are British. Some, aroused by rumours of easy profits, have a dose of gold rush fever.

“Friends of ours who saw Cape Verde on A Place in the Sun on Channel 4 went right ahead and bought an apartment off-plan. Prices have doubled since then,” said one young couple from Cheshire. “We’ve heard of people buying from a brochure without realising that the apartment is miles from town, has a tank instead of mains water and could easily have its sea view blocked by some other developer.”

For all the hype about Cape Verde being ‘the new Caribbean’ – but with lower prices and no jet lag – or ‘the Canaries minus the concrete’, there’s some doubt in the air as to whether Sal will measure up. The locals seem baffled by their newfound transitional state – half Third World backwater, half emerging international resort. Crime levels, once negligible, are beginning to creep up and the drugs-related murder of two Italian women in early 2007, though widely considered an isolated case, has brought worries about the darker sides of tourism.


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