The village that keeps rising from the volcanic ashes
FOUR years after the volcano erupted – razing everything in its path in Cape Verde’s Cha das Caldeiras valley – the floor tiles of the small, rebuilt inn are warm to the touch.
“We constructed too quickly on lava that had not yet cooled down,” says hotel owner Marisa Lopes.
“For the first months, the floors in the rooms were so hot that you couldn’t walk on them with bare feet.”
Lopes is one of dozens of entrepreneurs locked in a perpetual tug of war with the Pico do Fogo volcano towering over Cha das Caldeiras, whose population numbers 500.
The name means Peak of Fire in Portuguese. The volcano generates the bulk of the crater community’s gross domestic product, attracting some 5,000 tourists every year who need hotel beds, food and tour guides – about 30 make a living as guides in this remote part of West Africa. But on the downside, the festering giant erupts once a generation – six times in the last 200 years – destroying everything in its path; crops, homes, roads.
In 2014, Lopes watched helplessly as the Pico – almost 2,900m high – erupted after a 19-year slumber. Lava engulfed her brand new tourist hostel. Three months later, she built a new one, again in the flow zone of the crater.
“The volcano took a house from me, but it gave me another. Without it, there would be no tourism,” she says, undeterred.
Despite the constant danger and government efforts to dissuade them, the inhabitants of Cha das Caldeiras keep coming back.
After the last eruption, the military evacuated those in the path of the lava. But the people returned, reconstructing roads and rebuilding homes and hotels. Again.
Cicilio Montrond, 42, was also there in 2014, looking on as a river of molten rock spewing from the Pico do Fogo burnt his fruit trees and buried everything he owned in a thick, grey coat. The eruption killed no one, but left 1,500 people homeless.
After a few weeks in Sao Filipe, a nearby town to where the valley inhabitants were relocated, Montrond returned to Cha das Caldeiras with his wife.
Not a bird stirred in the air still polluted with ash, not a creature moved on the still warm lava ocean that now covered the valley floor. For weeks they lived in a tent on the roof of their destroyed house with no water, no electricity and no food apart from a few canned goods.
“It was dangerous. But we were home.”
For Montrond, it is unimaginable to live anywhere else.
“The volcano is my life,” Montrond says with a shrug.
“I was born here, I will die here.” The volcano gives. The volcano takes.
First it destroys the vines, then it provides fruitful soil for the planting of new ones. These produce wines – some of it for the export market.
Far from fearing or despising the peak’s constant threatening presence, the inhabitants appear to embrace it and have made it part of their identity. They evoke past eruptions with a smile, sometimes even a touch of nostalgia.
Margarita Lopes Dos Santos, 99, has been forced out of her home by the three last eruptions of the Pico do Fogo.
The first was in June 1951, shortly after she gave birth to her first child.
“I remember the first time like it was yesterday,” she says, through a beaming, toothless smile.
Outside her house, Lopes Dos Santos has planted red begonias that provide the only colour in the grey and black landscape.
“The resilience of the people of Cha is extraordinary,” says Jorge Nogueira, president of the municipal council of Sao Filipe, capital of the island of Fogo, Cape Verde.
“As soon as they could, they came back – to poor living conditions, but no matter: they are just happy to be home.”