AFRICAN MAGIC
Tropical paradise off continent’s west coast
WHEN I told people I was going to São Tomé and Príncipe, they looked at me blankly. No one knew where or what it was. Some thought it was a palm-fringed corner of Brazil. For everyone, the islands were a lost world.
Which was how Príncipe looked, from the heights overlooking the Bay of Agulhas – a lost kingdom, a Tolkienesque Middle-earth, a few kilometres from the intersection of zero degrees longitude and latitude.
It was sunset, and white tropical birds with long tails were banking majestically over a pink Atlantic. Beyond the bay, clouds swirled and parted to reveal spectacular volcanic towers, phonolite outcrops piercing the jungle canopy and rising 100m above the treetops. Away to the right, sheer-sided Table Mountain was remote, cloud-strewn and fantastical.
One of the world’s smallest countries, São Tomé and Príncipe consists of two green equatorial islands, about 150km apart and 250km off the west coast of Africa. Marooned in the Atlantic, with a tiny population and a trickle of tourists, they are remote, seductive and staggeringly beautiful.
As with all the best places, getting to these islands is not straightforward.
Flights from Portugal, the former colonial power, via Accra, take about seven hours to reach São Tomé, the capital and the larger of the two islands.
I emerged from the tiny airport terminal to air heavy with the aroma of mangoes and sea. A ramshackle golf cart took me into town, a drive of five minutes. Palm trees and sand lined the shore.
São Tomé feels like a delightful cross between some sleepy corner of the Caribbean and a remote Brazilian fishing village, with a sexy dash of Cuba thrown in for good measure.
There is a town – the nation’s capital – of crumbling colonial houses, a morning market of goats and chickens and unidentifiable fruit, and seaside avenues wet with ocean spray.
Beyond, the island eases into overgrown plantations and thick forest draped with endemic orchids.
Pink and blue and yellow houses, framed by porcelain roses, perch on stilts among banana groves. There are pristine beaches where you can buy fish straight from a fisherman’s pirogue, and jungleframed rivers that serve as jolly outdoor laundries, their banks a colourful patchwork of drying clothes.
For 31 million years, since they erupted from the Atlantic, history passed these islands by; they were uninhabited, an Edenic wilderness. Then the Portuguese turned up, late in the 15th century, on their way round Africa, looking for a profitable sea route to the east.
In the startling fertility of São Tomé and Príncipe they planted sugar cane, coffee and cocoa, importing first slaves and later bonded labourers from the mainland and Cape Verde islands.
Set around grand mansions, the plantations or roça were like sprawling villages of workers’ quarters, store rooms, drying sheds, even hospitals and schools for the few children the planters risked educating, all set amid the crops and forests.
Then suddenly, in 1974, the Portuguese left. The government in Lisbon had fallen and a new generation of politicians decreed that the Portuguese-African empire was at an end. The workers lingered in their old quarters, but their lives now revolved around fishing and subsistence agriculture, while the planters’ mansions fell into picturesque ruin.
But down in Angolares, on the east coast, the irrepressible João Carlos Silva has brought one back to life. Born on a plantation not far away, Silva left the islands as a young man to travel through Africa and Europe, eventually becoming famous for a popular cooking programme on Portuguese television.
Returning home, he restored the lovely Roça São João, where his father once worked as plantation manager, creating a small country hotel, fabulous restaurant – the tasting menu is an explosion of novel tropical tastes – and a cooking school, where he is training local youngsters.
Silva sees tourism on the islands, still in its infancy, as a tool for development, a way to preserve their unique environment while offering education and employment. It is a commitment he shares with another entrepreneur active here, not a local but a man who has dropped in from the outer hemisphere – Mark Shuttleworth, tech millionaire, environmentalist and space tourist.
Space travel tends to change one’s perspective. Having viewed the Earth in 2002 from the International Space Station, Shuttleworth turned his commitment to the environment into a passion.
A quest for somewhere to make a difference led him to Príncipe, the smaller of these two idyllic islands.
He could see the incredible potential for tourism and was determined to use this as a strategy for conservation and development. He started by buying and transforming an existing resort, the only one at the time, the delightful Bom Bom.
I took the 35-minute flight from São Tomé, and suddenly my own perspective shifted dramatically. I realised I had been wrong about São Tomé. Here, on Príncipe, was my real island retreat.
Just more than twice the size of Manhattan, Príncipe, a Unesco Biosphere Reserve, has a population of fewer than
7 000 people. From its empty beaches and jungle paths, from its sleepy fishing villages and toy-town capital, Santo Antonio, laid-back São Tomé suddenly looked like Hong Kong.
Only five years ago, Príncipe had almost no paved roads, internet or mobilephone signal and only patchy electricity.
Its beaches are havens for hundreds of nesting turtles, its forests contain a plethora of endemic birds, and on a stroll through the town square of an early evening you are quite likely to meet many leading citizens, including the island president, gossiping on the benches outside the church.
On Príncipe for a week, I would hardly see more than 20 other tourists.
The Shuttleworth enterprise – known as HBD, short for Here Be Dragons – has three properties on Príncipe; after the local government, it is the largest employer on the island, and one of the chief opportunities for locals beyond a life of subsistence agriculture and fishing.
The original property, Bom Bom, lounges on a peninsula between two stunning beaches, its villas strung out along the sands. Its four-star rating seems silly and irrelevant; the resort is a delight.
A long boardwalk leads past dark egrets and scurrying kingfishers to the restaurant and bar on an offshore island.
The friendly staff, the old-fashioned charm and the spectacular setting, with the whole place enveloped by the sound of surf, have adoring guests returning to Bom Bom again and again.
Opened in 2017, Roça Sundy, the second of HBD’s properties on the island, is a splendid former planter’s house, brought lovingly back to life. It is all colonial elegance: high ceilings, slow-turning fans, tall double doors, four-poster beds, deep balconies overlooking the gardens, an entrance hall the size of a tennis court, a pleasant air of tropical languor.
In its wood-lined bar you half expect to find bumbling chaps in linen suits and mysterious widows. Instead there was the cheery barman, Alexander, who whipped up a wonderful cocktail named the Jaja, which involved jackfruit, lemon and whisky. Later, dinner was served on a candlelit terrace overlooking the gardens, where a dance troupe was gliding between the palms to rhythms brought from mainland Africa five centuries ago.
But the newest property, Sundy Praia, is Príncipe’s star turn. Opened at the end of December, the creation of French architect Didier Lefort consists of 15 tented villas, though you would be forgiven for not noticing the tented part.
These are serious luxury suites: spacious, beautifully designed and elegantly appointed.
The wide wooden decks of some feature private pools. Soaps, creams, spa oils – even snacks in the minibar – have all been carefully developed in HBD’s organic lab to incorporate local forest ingredients and keep imports to a minimum. The resort has been carefully cocooned by South African landscape designer Greg Straw with native plants, tying the grounds neatly into the surrounding forests.
Soaring bamboo ribs that echo the massive trees support a space of cathedral proportions. In the mornings there is only the sound of surf and birdsong.
On my last day I went with the guide by boat to Praia Banana, so named for its curving form. Salads of local ingredients and organic vegetables from the resort gardens were laid out, while coconuts were split open.
Praia Banana is absurdly beautiful, the most perfect beach. We were completely alone, our footprints the only ones in the sand. That is luxury.