Mindelo

Mindelo owes its existence to geology and to coal. Porto Grande is a drowned volcanic crater about 4 km across and a large natural harbour, but São Vicente was almost waterless and stayed empty long after the Portuguese claimed it. A settlement was founded on the bay in 1793 but grew slowly for want of water. What changed matters was the age of steam: in 1838 the British East India Company set up a coal depot on the bay, and Mindelo grew into the refuelling stop for shipping crossing between Europe, South America and West Africa.

For the rest of the nineteenth century the town filled with coal hulks, ship chandlers, consulates, British managers and Cabo Verdean labourers who rowed and carried the coal. In 1884 a submarine telegraph cable was landed here, and the town acquired the customs house, the governor's palace, the grid of streets and the Portuguese and British architecture that still define its centre. Prosperity was never evenly shared, and the work was hard and badly paid.

Coal gave way to oil, competing ports took the traffic, and the bunkering trade declined through the twentieth century, leaving high unemployment and heavy emigration to Europe and the United States. The city turned to what it had built up alongside the harbour — schools, a secondary school that educated much of the national elite, theatre, newspapers and music. Since independence in 1975 Mindelo has remained the country's cultural capital, with fishing, shipping, a container terminal and cultural tourism as its economic base.

Mindelo is the musical capital of Cabo Verde. Morna, the slow, wistful song form whose lyrics turn on sodade — longing for people and places left behind — was shaped in the archipelago and became identified above all with this city and with Cesária Évora, who sang barefoot in its bars for decades before international fame in the 1990s; UNESCO added morna to its list of intangible cultural heritage in 2019. Coladeira, faster and sharper-tongued, developed alongside it, and live music is still played in the centre most nights of the week.

Carnival is the other great expression of the city. Neighbourhood groups spend months building floats and costumes, and the parades through the centre in February or March are the city's great spectacle, with a style that owes something to Brazil. In August the Baía das Gatas festival brings local and international music to a bay outside town.

The city has a literary and theatrical tradition to match: the Claridade movement of the 1930s, which reoriented Cabo Verdean writing towards Creole life, was founded here, and the Mindelact festival, the country's most important theatre festival, brings companies from abroad each year. Mindelenses have a reputation across the islands for irony, elegance and a certain superiority about their own city, which the rest of the country notes with amusement.

About 70,000 people live in Mindelo, roughly nine in ten of the island's population, in a city that climbs from the harbour up the bare hillsides behind. The old centre holds the offices, schools and shops; most people live in the dense painted neighbourhoods above it, such as Monte Sossego and Ribeira Bote.

The port remains the economic anchor — container handling, ship repair, fishing and the ferry link to Santo Antão — alongside fish processing, a university campus and technical schools, construction, and the cultural and tourism economy built around music and carnival. Unemployment, especially among the young, is a persistent problem, and remittances from a large diaspora matter as much here as anywhere in the country.

Water is desalinated, though the plant does not cover all of the island's needs. The day starts early at the port and the markets, quietens in the afternoon heat, and opens out in the evening, when the Praça Nova fills with families and the bars begin tuning up. Housing, water supply and the seasonality of work are the recurring subjects of local debate.

Mindelo eats from the channel between the islands. Tuna, wahoo, moray, octopus and lobster come in at the port, and the São Vicente speciality is percebes — goose barnacles, steamed and eaten by cracking off the end and peeling the skin, or cooked into a barnacle stew. Fish is grilled whole, fried, or stewed with potato, tomato and onion into a caldeirada.

Cachupa is the daily dish, as everywhere in Cabo Verde: hominy corn and beans simmered for hours with whatever meat or fish is available, then fried the next morning with an egg as cachupa refogada. Fresh bread rolls from neighbourhood bakeries are the standard street food, and xerém, a corn dish served with soup, turns up in city kitchens.

Much of the fresh produce is ferried over from Santo Antão — bananas, papaya, mango, coffee, goat's cheese and grogue, the sugarcane spirit drunk neat or mixed with cane syrup and lime into a ponche. Beer, imported Portuguese wine and strong black coffee fill out the list, and the bars of the old centre serve all of it until late.