Chapter 01 · c. 1456 – 1550
Uninhabited islands and the first town in the tropics
Portuguese navigators reached the empty archipelago around 1456 and in 1462 founded Ribeira Grande on Santiago — the first permanent European city in the tropics.
When Portuguese ships first reached the Cape Verde islands around 1456, they found a barren but uninhabited archipelago: ten volcanic islands and several islets scattered across the mid-Atlantic, with no human population. The Venetian captain Alvise Cadamosto, sailing in the service of Prince Henry the Navigator, is credited with the earliest landfall, and over the following decade captains such as Diogo Gomes and the Genoese António de Noli charted the remaining islands. The absence of any native society set Cape Verde apart from almost every other part of the Portuguese expansion: its entire population, culture and economy would be created from scratch by settlers and the enslaved people they brought with them.
In 1462 the Portuguese established a permanent settlement at Ribeira Grande on the southern coast of Santiago, the largest island. Now known as Cidade Velha, it was the first permanent European colonial city in the tropics, and it became the administrative and religious heart of the archipelago — seat of a captaincy and, from the 1530s, of a bishopric. The first settlers were a mixed group of Portuguese, Genoese and Flemish adventurers, reprieved convicts and Sephardic Jews fleeing the Inquisition, who were granted privileges to trade along the nearby Guinea coast. Within decades the town acquired churches, a cathedral begun in 1556, and the fortified works that guarded its harbour.
The islands' value lay entirely in their position. Lying athwart the Atlantic sea lanes between Europe, West Africa and the soon-to-be-colonised Americas, Cape Verde was ideally placed as a way-station and a base from which to organise the West African trade. The Portuguese crown granted Santiago's settlers the right to trade in the "Rivers of Guinea" on the mainland, and Ribeira Grande quickly turned from an outpost into a commercial hub — one whose prosperity would soon come to rest on the buying and selling of human beings.
“Barren of people but not of vegetation, the islands offered a blank canvas — and on it, in 1462, Europeans built their first permanent city in the tropics.”
— The founding of Ribeira Grande
Turning points
- c. 1456Colonisation
Portuguese reach the uninhabited islands
Sailing for Prince Henry the Navigator, the Venetian captain Alvise Cadamosto and others made landfall on the empty Cape Verde archipelago; further islands were charted over the next decade by Diogo Gomes and António de Noli.
See the data - 1462Formation
- 1466Economy & Trade
Trading privileges over the Guinea coast
The Portuguese crown granted Santiago's settlers the right to trade in the "Rivers of Guinea" on the West African mainland, anchoring the colony's economy to commerce with the coast.
See the data - 1493–1495Religion
Chapter sources: History of Cabo Verde, History of Cape Verde, The Portuguese Colonization of Cape Verde, Cidade Velha, Historic Centre of Ribeira Grande, Cidade Velha
Chapter 02 · c. 1500 – 1770
Entrepôt of the slave trade — and its decline
Ribeira Grande grew rich as a sorting-house of the transatlantic slave trade before corsair raids, the trade's shift and French destruction in 1712 brought ruin and a move of the capital to Praia.
Through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Cape Verde became a key entrepôt of the Atlantic slave trade. Enslaved Africans seized in the wars of the Upper Guinea coast were carried to Santiago, where Ribeira Grande served as a "sorting-house": captives were held, baptised, taxed and re-exported across the Atlantic to the Americas, while others were retained to work the islands' plantations of cotton and indigo. By the mid-sixteenth century thousands were passing through each year, and the wealth of the trade made Ribeira Grande one of the busiest ports of the Portuguese Atlantic. Out of this brutal commerce, and the intimate proximity of European settlers and African captives, grew the islands' Creole society.
Such riches drew raiders. In 1585 the English privateer Sir Francis Drake sacked Ribeira Grande, and other corsairs harried the islands through the period of the Iberian Union (1580–1640), when the Portuguese and Spanish crowns were joined. The decisive blow fell in 1712, when the French corsair Jacques Cassard stormed and looted Ribeira Grande, stripping even the bells from its churches and the marble from its floors. The town, exposed on its coastal ravine, never recovered.
The trade itself was already ebbing. As other European powers entered the Guinea commerce and direct routes to the Americas bypassed the islands, Cape Verde's role as a slaving entrepôt waned, and its economy slid into long decline. Administration drifted toward the more defensible inland plateau of Praia, which offered better protection from naval attack, and in 1770 Praia formally became the capital. Ribeira Grande dwindled into the quiet ruin later renamed Cidade Velha — the "old city" — its abandoned forts and churches a monument to a vanished prosperity built on human bondage.
“Out of the brutal proximity of European settlers and enslaved Africans grew a new people, a new language and a new music — the Creole world of the islands.”
— The making of Cape Verdean society
Turning points
- 16th centuryPeoples & Migration
A sorting-house of the slave trade
Ribeira Grande became a major entrepôt where enslaved Africans from the Upper Guinea coast were held, baptised, taxed and re-exported to the Americas, with thousands passing through annually by mid-century.
See the data - 1585War & Rupture
Drake sacks Ribeira Grande
The English privateer Sir Francis Drake attacked and sacked the wealthy port of Ribeira Grande, one of several corsair raids that beset the islands during the era of the Iberian Union.
See the data - 1712War & Rupture
Cassard's French raid destroys the city
The French corsair Jacques Cassard stormed and looted Ribeira Grande, stripping its churches and houses; the coastal town, already declining, never recovered from the assault.
See the data - 1770Politics & Power
Figures of the era
Jacques Cassard1679–1740
French corsair
Naval captain and privateer whose 1712 expedition against Portuguese and other colonies reached Cape Verde, where his men sacked and looted Ribeira Grande, hastening the decline of the islands' first capital.
Chapter sources: History of Cabo Verde, The Portuguese Colonization of Cape Verde, History of Cape Verde, The small island nation of Cabo Verde was once a hub for slave trading, Cassard expedition (1712), Cidade Velha
Chapter 03 · 1770 – 1956
Creole culture, the coaling port, and the years of hunger
A distinctive Creole language and the morna gave the islands a soul, even as Mindelo became an Atlantic coaling and cable station and recurring droughts brought famines that killed tens of thousands.
By this period Cape Verde had become a thoroughly Creole society. From the fusion of Portuguese and West African peoples emerged Kriolu (Cape Verdean Creole), a Portuguese-based language spoken across the islands, and a culture that found its fullest voice in the morna — a slow, melancholy song-form dwelling on love, parting, the sea and the longing called sodade (saudade). The poet Eugénio Tavares of Brava (1867–1930) raised the morna to a literary art in Creole verse, and in the twentieth century Cesária Évora, the "barefoot diva", carried the music to the world; in 2019 UNESCO inscribed morna on its list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Slavery itself was abolished in Portuguese territory in stages, ending legally in 1869, though coercive labour persisted.
The age of steam gave the islands a brief new strategic role. The deep natural harbour of Porto Grande at Mindelo, on São Vicente, was developed from the 1830s as a coaling station where British and other shipping refuelled on the transatlantic crossing; by the late nineteenth century hundreds of vessels called there each year. Mindelo also became an important node of the world's submarine telegraph network, a relay point for trans-Atlantic cables linking Europe, Africa and South America. For a few decades the port made São Vicente cosmopolitan and comparatively prosperous, before the shift to oil-burning ships eroded its trade.
Yet the dominant experience of these centuries was hunger. Lying in the path of recurrent drought, the islands suffered repeated crop failures, and the Portuguese administration's response was chronically inadequate. Major famines in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries killed at least 100,000 people, and the twentieth-century famines of 1941–43 and 1947–48 together killed tens of thousands more, with starving refugees interned in camps near Praia where they died by the hundreds. These catastrophes, compounded by overpopulation and neglect, drove generations of Cape Verdeans to emigrate — to the United States, to Portugal and to West Africa — founding the vast diaspora that would come to outnumber those who remained.
“Morna is the music of departure and return — sorrowful chronicles of slavery, isolation and emigration, sung in Creole for a people forever leaving.”
— On the morna
Turning points
- from c. 1838Economy & Trade
Mindelo becomes an Atlantic coaling station
The deep harbour of Porto Grande at Mindelo on São Vicente was developed as a coaling station for transatlantic steamships and later a submarine-cable relay, briefly making the port cosmopolitan and prosperous.
See the data - 1869Politics & Power
- 18th–19th centuriesCatastrophe
Famines kill at least 100,000
Recurrent droughts produced a series of catastrophic famines; during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries at least 100,000 people died of starvation and disease, amid an inadequate colonial response.
See the data - 1867–1930Culture & Ideas
- 1941–43 and 1947–48Catastrophe
The twentieth-century famines
Two further droughts brought famines that together killed tens of thousands; starving refugees were interned in camps outside Praia, and survivors emigrated in growing numbers, deepening the diaspora.
See the data
Figures of the era
Chapter sources: History of Cape Verde, History of Cabo Verde, Famine in Cape Verde, Eugénio Tavares, The story of morna: Cape Verde's music of displacement and return, Morna, musical practice of Cabo Verde, Cesária Évora
Chapter 04 · 1956 – 1975
Cabral, the PAIGC, and independence
Amílcar Cabral's PAIGC bound Cape Verde to Guinea-Bissau's liberation war; Cabral was assassinated in 1973, and the archipelago won independence on 5 July 1975.
The movement that freed Cape Verde was born of a shared cause with the West African mainland. In 1956 the agronomist Amílcar Cabral — born in 1924 to Cape Verdean parents and trained in Lisbon — founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC), conceiving the two Portuguese territories as a single nation to be liberated together. Cape Verde itself, with no forests and a small population, was unsuited to guerrilla war, so the armed struggle was fought on the Guinea-Bissau mainland from 1963; but Cape Verdean cadres were prominent in the party's leadership, and the islands' fate was tied to the war's outcome.
Cabral became one of the most admired theorists of African liberation, combining patient political organisation with guerrilla strategy and writing influentially on culture and national struggle. He did not live to see victory: on 20 January 1973 he was assassinated at a PAIGC roadblock in Conakry by a disgruntled party member and others, in a plot widely linked to Portuguese intelligence. The PAIGC nonetheless declared Guinea-Bissau independent in September 1973, and the cause of both territories was carried forward by his comrades, among them Aristides Pereira, the party's secretary-general.
Decolonisation came with the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, when the Estado Novo regime in Lisbon fell, exhausted in part by its African wars. The new Portuguese government negotiated handovers across the empire. A transitional government prepared Cape Verde for sovereignty, elections returned a PAIGC assembly, and on 5 July 1975 the Republic of Cape Verde declared its independence, with Aristides Pereira as first president and Pedro Pires as prime minister. The United States recognised the new state the same day.
“Cabral conceived Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau as a single nation to be freed together — "two bodies with only one heart".”
— On the PAIGC's vision
Turning points
- 1956Politics & Power
- 1963War & Rupture
Armed struggle begins on the mainland
Because the islands were unsuited to guerrilla war, the PAIGC waged its armed campaign on the Guinea-Bissau mainland from 1963, while Cape Verdean cadres filled the party's leadership.
See the data - 20 January 1973Politics & Power
- 25 April 1974Politics & Power
- 5 July 1975Independence
Independence of Cape Verde
The Republic of Cape Verde declared independence from Portugal on 5 July 1975 under the PAIGC, with Aristides Pereira as first president; the United States recognised the new state the same day.
See the data
Figures of the era
Amílcar Cabral1924–1973
Founder of the PAIGC and leader of the liberation struggle
Cape Verdean–Guinean agronomist and revolutionary theorist who founded the PAIGC in 1956 and led the joint liberation movement of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Internationally admired as a thinker on national liberation, he was assassinated in Conakry on 20 January 1973, before either territory became independent.
Chapter sources: Amílcar Lopes Cabral (1924–1973), Amílcar Cabral, History of Cabo Verde, History of Cape Verde, A Guide to the History of Recognition: Cabo Verde, Aristides Pereira
Chapter 05 · 1975 – 1991
The broken union and the turn to democracy
A 1980 coup in Bissau ended the planned union with Guinea-Bissau, and a decade later Cape Verde peacefully abandoned one-party rule for multiparty democracy.
Independence was meant to be a prelude to union. The PAIGC governed both Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, their constitutions envisaged eventual unification, and the two "sister republics" shared a party, near-identical flags and an anthem. That project collapsed on 14 November 1980, when a coup in Bissau led by João Bernardo "Nino" Vieira overthrew President Luís Cabral. Resentment in Guinea-Bissau at perceived Cape Verdean dominance of the joint party helped trigger the coup, and the union never recovered. The Cape Verdean branch broke away to form a separate party, the African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde (PAICV), and the two states went their own ways.
Under Aristides Pereira and the PAICV, Cape Verde remained a one-party state through the 1980s, but a comparatively pragmatic and undogmatic one. The government pursued cautious development, food security against the ever-present threat of drought, and a non-aligned foreign policy that kept ties with both East and West and, crucially, with the large diaspora whose remittances helped sustain the islands. By the end of the decade, with the Cold War ending and democratic pressures rising across Africa, demands for political pluralism grew at home.
The transition was swift and peaceful. An opposition coalition, the Movement for Democracy (MpD), formed in Praia in April 1990; the National Assembly abolished one-party rule in September 1990; and in January 1991 Cape Verde held its first free multiparty elections. The MpD won a decisive parliamentary majority, and in February its candidate, António Mascarenhas Monteiro, defeated President Pereira with some 73 per cent of the vote. The PAICV accepted the result and handed over power — a model democratic transition that set the tone for the decades to come.
“The two sister republics had shared a party, near-identical flags and an anthem — "two bodies with only one heart" — until the 1980 coup in Bissau pulled them apart.”
— The end of the union
Turning points
- 14 November 1980Politics & Power
- 1981Politics & Power
- April–September 1990Politics & Power
- January–February 1991Politics & Power
Chapter sources: History of Cape Verde, 1980 Guinea-Bissau coup d'état, History of Cabo Verde, Background Note: Cape Verde, 1991 Cape Verdean presidential election
Chapter 06 · 1991 – present
A stable democracy and a global people
Since 1991 Cape Verde has alternated power peacefully between rival parties, graduated from least-developed status, and remained bound to a diaspora larger than its resident population.
Since the 1991 transition, Cape Verde has been one of Africa's most stable and consistently democratic states. Power has alternated peacefully between the MpD and the PAICV across successive elections, and the country regularly ranks at or near the top of continental indices of political and civil freedom. With few natural resources, the economy turned to services — above all tourism, which boomed from the 1990s, together with remittances from the diaspora and offshore fisheries — and in 2007 Cape Verde graduated from the United Nations category of least-developed countries, one of only a handful of states ever to do so. In 2013 the government adopted Cabo Verde as the country's official name in all languages.
Emigration remains central to the national experience. Driven over centuries by drought, famine and limited opportunity, Cape Verdeans settled in the United States — especially southern New England — as well as in Portugal, the Netherlands, Senegal and elsewhere, so that the diaspora now substantially outnumbers the roughly half-million people living on the islands. Remittances, return migration and a far-flung cultural network keep the homeland and its scattered children tightly bound, and the morna's enduring theme of sodade — the ache of longing for an absent home — speaks directly to this dispersed people.
Modern Cabo Verde presents itself, with some justification, as a development and governance success: a peaceful, services-based democracy with high social indicators by regional standards, deep ties to Europe and the wider lusophone world, and a vibrant Creole culture that its global diaspora carries everywhere. Its challenges are those of a small, drought-prone island state — water scarcity, dependence on imports and tourism, and the pull of emigration — but its trajectory since 1975 stands out as one of the steadier stories of post-colonial Africa.
“More Cape Verdeans live abroad than on the islands themselves — a nation whose other half is scattered across the Atlantic world, bound home by remittance and song.”
— The diaspora
Turning points
- 2001Politics & Power
- 2004Culture & Ideas
- 2007Economy & Trade
Graduation from least-developed status
Buoyed by tourism, remittances and stable governance, Cape Verde graduated from the UN list of least-developed countries — a rare achievement for an African state — confirming its development progress.
See the data - 2009Culture & Ideas
- 2019Culture & Ideas
Figures of the era
Cesária Évora1941–2011
Singer, the "barefoot diva"
Cape Verde's most celebrated artist, who from the 1990s brought the morna to the world stage, singing in Creole and performing barefoot in solidarity with the islands' poor; she won a Grammy in 2004 and became a global symbol of Cape Verdean identity and sodade.
Chapter sources: Background Note: Cape Verde, History of Cape Verde, Cesária Évora, The story of morna: Cape Verde's music of displacement and return, Morna, musical practice of Cabo Verde, Cabo Verde — Country Overview, Cidade Velha, Historic Centre of Ribeira Grande, Cidade Velha, Cape Verdean diaspora