A Brief History of Cabo Verde

When Portuguese and Italian explorers navigating the west coast of Africa first visited the archipelago around 1455, the islands known today as Cabo Verde were uninhabited, although they were likely known to early Arab, Phoenician, and coastal African maritime travelers, particularly as a source of salt. By 1465 Portuguese merchants and explorers established permanent settlements overlooking Cabo Verde’s natural harbors. They began using the fertile river deltas for agriculture, and more economically significant, they used the islands as a center for slave trade. For these merchants, Cabo Verde’s critical role in the enterprise of capturing, selling, and buying Africans reached its early height between 1475 and 1575. Compared to the swampy, humid Africa coast, the dry Cabo Verde Islands had several advantages as a business base: deep harbors; fewer mosquito-borne tropical diseases; cool maritime winds; strategic trade winds to the Americas and the Caribbean; and few escape route possibilities for captives.

The island of Santiago is the site of Cabo Verde’s first European settlement, Ribeira Grande, located on the southwest coast. A UNESCO World Heritage Site, it is known today as Cidade Velha. The fortifications are the oldest European colonial settlement in the tropics. The coastal settlement was an administrative and religious center for the community of Ribeira Grande, which rapidly grew in population beginning in the fifteenth century. The fort remained a key port of call for Portuguese commerce through the seventeenth century because of its strategic location along trade routes connecting Africa, Europe, Brazil, and the Caribbean. By 1533 Ribeira Grande had a Catholic bishop and by 1556, plans were underway for a cathedral (constructed with enslaved African labor). The settlement eventually had a fortress, several churches, and a town square. The marble pillory in the center of the square used during slave auctions and disciplinary actions stands today as a reminder of the region’s complicity in human trafficking. After numerous looting attacks by pirates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the capital seat moved from Ribeira Grande to the current Praia plateau location in 1652.

Portuguese traders had a virtual monopoly on the Atlantic slave trade beginning in the sixteenth century, and Cabo Verde was a key relay station within the Atlantic slave trade network. Coastal traders brought captured Africans to Cabo Verde on a regular basis before sending most of them to Portuguese and Spanish colonies in South America.