São Tomé

The Portuguese found the islands uninhabited around 1470, and Álvaro Caminha founded the first lasting settlement in 1493; the town on the sheltered Ana Chaves bay became the capital of a colony that was an experiment in a new kind of economy. Sugar was planted with the labour of enslaved Africans shipped from the nearby mainland, and by the early sixteenth century the town was the centre of the world's first plantation-slavery economy and a major entrepôt of the Atlantic slave trade. The fort of São Sebastião was built at the edge of the bay in 1566 to defend it.

That wealth did not last. Slave revolts, attacks from the sea and competition from Brazilian sugar ruined the industry, and the capital declined for two centuries into a small colonial port. Coffee and then cacao revived it: by the early 1900s the islands were the world's largest cocoa producer, the crop grown on great estates, the roças, and worked by contract labourers recruited under coercion from Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde. The town's administrative buildings, avenues and quays date from that period.

The Batepá massacre of 1953, in which colonial forces and settlers killed hundreds of islanders amid labour unrest, became a founding grievance of the independence movement. Independence came on 12 July 1975; most Portuguese planters left, the roças were nationalised and ran down, and the capital absorbed people from the estates. The country was a one-party state until 1990 and has held multiparty elections since. The town has grown outward along the coast, while its colonial core, faded and largely intact, remains the heart of national life.

The capital is small, unhurried and Creole. Portuguese is the language of government, school and the street, with the Forro creole spoken alongside it, and the phrase leve leve — gently, slowly — is used by São Toméans themselves to describe the pace at which the town works. Life is conducted outdoors: on the sea wall, at the market, in doorways and under trees, and a stranger who greets people first will be treated very differently from one who does not.

Catholicism shapes the calendar. The cathedral and the parish churches fill on Sundays, and saints' day festivals across the island bring processions, drumming and performances of the tchiloli, a musical dance performance that tells a dramatic story and for which the town is well known, and of the danço-congo, which likewise combines music, dance and theatre. These are community events rather than tourist shows, and are announced locally rather than scheduled far in advance.

Music runs through everything: the ússua and socopé rhythms, and puxa, a fusion of local rhythms with the Angolan rebita. Football is followed closely, with the city's clubs playing at the Estádio Nacional 12 de Julho, Independence Day on 12 July is marked in the capital, and the old roças outside the town, still lived in by the families of estate workers, are regarded as part of the national story rather than as ruins.

About 69,000 people lived in the capital's district, Água Grande, at the 2012 census, over a third of the country's population, and the town and its immediate coast hold most of the national economy. Government, the port, fishing, small commerce and a growing tourism business provide the formal work; a great deal of the rest is informal trading, market selling and fishing from wooden boats drawn up on the town beach.

This is one of the poorest countries in the world, small, remote and dependent on aid, remittances and imports, and that is visible in daily life: power cuts are frequent, water supply is uneven, and almost every manufactured good arrives by ship at a price. Cocoa remains the main export, alongside copra, coffee and palm oil, and the long-held hope of offshore oil has not paid off.

The day starts at first light. Fishermen land the catch on the beach and at the villages along the coast, the market is busiest before nine, offices work through the morning, and the heat of the early afternoon slows everything. Evenings are spent on the sea wall and in bars, and are short — the sun sets around six all year on the equator. Housing has spread north along the coast road and inland towards Trindade as people have moved in from the old estates, and unemployment among young people is the persistent local concern.

São Toméan cooking is tropical, fish-forward and slow. Calulu is the dish that defines it: fish, sometimes with shrimp, or meat cooked with palm oil, okra, tomato, garlic and leafy greens and served with funge, a family meal that is also shared out near the churches at religious festivals. Palm oil gives much of the island's food its colour and weight, and chilli is never far away.

Fish is eaten daily — grilled over charcoal, as in barriga de peixe served with rice, breadfruit or cassava, fried, or stewed — and flying fish, cooked or dried, appears alongside whatever the boats bring in. Other staples of the market cook their way into everything: breadfruit, jackfruit, taro, maize, beans, safú, the fruit of the African pear tree sold as street food, and enormous quantities of cooked banana.

The islands' own cocoa and coffee are the best-known products. Cocoa is grown on the old estates in the hills behind the town and made into chocolate, coffee has been grown at Monte Café since the nineteenth century, and coffee even turns up as a seasoning, as in chicken with coffee sauce. Palm wine, tapped from the trees and drunk the same day, is regarded as the national drink, alongside fresh juices from the island's fruit and local spirits.