Cape Verde
A volcanic island nation adrift in the Atlantic
Cape Verde, officially Cabo Verde, is an archipelago of ten volcanic islands scattered in the Atlantic off the West African coast, a country with no land borders and a culture forged from the meeting of Portugal and Africa. Once an uninhabited waystation that became a hub of the Atlantic slave trade, it has reinvented itself as one of Africa's most stable and well-governed democracies, with a large diaspora that outnumbers the roughly half a million people living on the islands. Its soulful morna music, immortalized by the barefoot diva Cesária Évora, is known worldwide.
The islands split into the windward Barlavento group in the north and the leeward Sotavento group in the south, ranging from flat, sandy isles like Sal and Boa Vista to dramatically mountainous ones like Santo Antão and Santiago. The active volcano Pico do Fogo, on the island of Fogo, is the highest point at about 2,829 meters and last erupted in 2014. Chronically short of rain and arable land, Cape Verde depends heavily on tourism to its beaches, fishing, remittances from emigrants, and services tied to its mid-Atlantic location.
Portuguese navigators reached the empty islands in the 1460s and made them a base for provisioning ships and trafficking enslaved Africans, producing a Creole society and the Kriolu language spoken today. After centuries of neglect, drought, and famine that drove waves of emigration, Cape Verde won independence in 1975 alongside Guinea-Bissau, with which it briefly shared a liberation movement. Since the 1990s it has built a reputation for political stability, multiparty democracy, and steady development, standing out in a turbulent region as a peaceful Atlantic crossroads.