Cape Verde emerges from the shadows
 

For the past 500 years, Cape Verde - a tiny mid-Atlantic country consisting of 10 islands and eight islets 240 miles off the coast of Senegal in West Africa - has existed in virtual obscurity. Geographically isolated and struggling to recover from a Portuguese occupation that ended in 1975, it was a place that locals worked hard to leave.

Recently, however, the tides have shifted. Cape Verdeans who have been living abroad are returning and, perhaps more importantly, developers and estate agents are looking to the archipelago as an up-and-coming holiday home market.

"What's remarkable is that the vast majority of people would not have heard of Cape Verde a year ago," says Amar Sodhi, managing director of international property agency Avatar International. "But for me there is no speculation as to whether it will be the next property hot spot. It is inevitable. Cape Verde is Bulgaria prices on the closest tropical islands to mainland Europe."

Several factors support his case. Cape Verde is politically and economically stable with year-round sunshine, starkly beautiful volcanic mountains, desert terrain and endless beaches. It will soon benefit from two new international airports and it's only an hour's flying time south of well-established destinations in the Canary Islands. The government has also recently relaxed property laws to attract outside investors.

So why has it taken so long forCape Verde to attract international attention?
Following its discovery by Portugal in 1462, the previously uninhabited islands were populated by a mix of Africans, Portuguese, and other European voyagers. In the days of sail, uncertain winds and treacherous currents often made them hard to reach, and there were devastating cycles of drought, starvation and death. At times up to half the population died.

The one benefit to Cape Verde's isolated position was that residents became skilled sailors. But this resulted in a tradition of able-bodied men and women heading abroad to work, starting at the end of the 18th century when whalers from New Bedford and Nantucket on the eastern seaboard of the newly independent US regularly sailed to the islands to pick up crews.

These early ties to New England made the US the primary destination for Cape Verdean migrant workers and, by the end of the 19th century, the trickle of people permanently resettling had become a flood. Immigrants formed tight-knit communities concentrated in Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut and worked in ports, textile mills and cranberry bogs.

The anguish of being separated from loved ones for years, even a lifetime, is expressed in Cape Verdean music, especially the bittersweet songs called "morna".
The exodus continued into the 20th century, with many Cape Verdeans leaving to study and work abroad, according to Pedro Martins, who fought in the 1975 war of independence and was part of the group that put together Cape Verde's National Assembly. "The Portuguese colonial power was never very sympathetic to us," he explains. "They allowed people to die from drought and famine and did nothing at all to save them. Most Cape Verdeans didn't want to go back because life there was just too hard."
The "bad memories" lingered even after the revolution. Martins himself left for the US, where he trained as an architect, and he still lives in Washington, DC. His 12 brothers and sisters also left Cape Verde to study and travel. But he now returns to the islands twice a year and says he plans to live there full-time from 2009.
"Now that we have our independence, stability and are creating a very modern and efficient infrastructure, there is no doubt that a lot of Cape Verdeans will go back because the Cape Verdes are such a nice place to be," he says. "I would say the number going back has already increased around sevenfold.

"Last year I went . . . with a group of Cape Verdean Americans looking to build a hotel on one of the islands, [and] I would say it was the first time, a group of [us] went back . . . with business in mind. It was like things had come full circle."

Jorge Benchimol Duarte is another Cape Verdean who has abandoned a life abroad - in New York - for a new one on the archipelago. He is now executive director of Tecnicil, the developer behind Vila Verde, a 900-unit project on the island of Sal. "The environment here is better than it has ever been in the past and there are opportunities here that didn't exist before," he says. "Returning Cape Verdeans have bought skills back with them and it's given us a whole other dimension as a nation."
He thinks Cape Verde's stability is one of its biggest attractions. Thecountry, a democratic republic, held its first multiparty elections in 1991. Its government has pursued open-market economic policies, launching a far-reaching privatisation programme and welcoming foreign investors. With its currency pegged to the euro, developing tourism is a top priority.

Certainly Tecnicil is betting that these measures will be successful. Vila Verde covers 45 hectares and has shops, bars and restaurants, a five star hotel, tennis courts and a botanical garden. The residential segment includes a mixture of gated apartments (priced from €60,000), town houses (from €170,000) and villas (from €270,000) set in landscaped gardens.

The danger is that Cape Verde goes too far, allowing itself to be overdeveloped like the Canaries, especially Tenerife and Gran Canaria, whose once lush hills are now honeycombed with ugly white apartments and hotels. "This is a big challenge for our country, for developers and the public authorities," Duarte acknowledges. "We have gone a long way in eliminating red tape and creating a better business environment. [Still] the public authorities are taking care of the environmental aspect. It's a matter of having the right vision and then creating the regulations to suit the vision, not the other way around."

Paul Akwei, of the London-based property search agency GL Properties, is so confident about the Cape Verde market that he will soon relocate to the island to open three offices dealing in commercial and residential property. "I've spent much of the past year there researching the islands and I see it as the huge potential property market, thanks to its climate and stable economy," he says. "There is a lot of off-plan activity and some lovely old colonial property available."

Price growth has been strong in the past two years and is predicted to hit 7 per cent in 2006. "And that's before the direct airline flights [from the UK] commence this year," Akwei says. (Most visitors connect through Lisbon now.) "When you look at the prices in the Canary Islands, Spain and Portugal, where they are three to four times those on Cape Verde, it seems hard to see how buyers can lose."
 

By Catherine Moye
Published: July 1 2006
The Financial Times