São Tomé and Príncipe

The islands were uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived around 1470, and from the 1490s they became the site of the world's first plantation economy based on African slave labour, growing sugar with enslaved people shipped from the nearby mainland. São Tomé was briefly the world's largest sugar producer and a major entrepôt of the transatlantic slave trade.

As sugar declined, the islands turned to coffee and then cacao, and by the early 1900s São Tomé and Príncipe was the world's largest cocoa producer, grown on huge estates — roças — worked by "contract labourers" recruited, often coercively, from Angola, Mozambique, and Cape Verde; conditions there prompted a British chocolate-industry boycott in 1909. The 1953 Batepá massacre, in which colonial forces and settlers killed hundreds of islanders amid labour unrest, became a founding grievance of the independence movement.

Independence from Portugal came on 12 July 1975. Most Portuguese planters left, the roças were nationalised and ran down, and the country was a one-party Marxist state until 1990, when it became one of the first in Africa to adopt multiparty democracy. Elections and peaceful transfers of power have followed, with a few quickly reversed coup attempts, and Príncipe has had autonomous regional government since 1995.

São Toméan culture is Luso-African and Creole, overwhelmingly Catholic, and relaxed in pace — the local phrase leve-leve, "easy-easy", is a byword for the national temperament. The old roças, with their manor houses, hospitals, chapels, and rows of workers' quarters, are living communities and a distinctive part of the landscape and identity.

Music and dance carry the African inheritance: the ússua and socopé ballroom forms, the drumming and processional danço-congo, and the tchiloli, a centuries-old outdoor folk play retelling a medieval European tale of Charlemagne, performed over hours at saints' festivals. Extended family, the church calendar, and community obligation shape daily life.

Most people live on São Tomé, in and around the capital and along the northeast coast, with Príncipe home to only a few thousand. This is one of the poorest countries in the world, small and dependent on aid and remittances, with frequent power cuts and weak infrastructure.

Cocoa is still the main export, increasingly as organic, fine-flavour beans sold to premium chocolate makers, alongside coffee, copra, palm oil, and pepper. Long-held hopes of offshore oil have not paid off. Tourism is small but growing, centred on the forests, the roças, birdlife, beaches, and whale-watching, and Príncipe — a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve — has staked its future on low-volume, sustainable travel.

São Toméan cooking is tropical and fish-forward. Calulu, a stew of smoked or fresh fish with palm oil, okra, and a mass of forest greens and herbs, served with angú (a firm cornmeal or breadfruit paste), is the national dish. Grilled and fried fish, breadfruit, and cooked bananas are everyday staples, and the molho no prato — fish poached at the table in a pepper and lime sauce — is a speciality.

The islands' own cocoa and coffee are excellent, and there is a small artisanal chocolate industry. Palm wine and a sugarcane spirit, cacharamba, are the local drinks, along with fresh juices from the abundant tropical fruit.

Pico Cão Grande, a slender volcanic spire rising sheer from the rainforest of Obô Natural Park, is the emblem of São Tomé, admired from viewpoints and forest trails. The park covers much of the mountainous interior of both islands, dense with endemic birds, orchids, and giant begonias, explored with a guide from villages such as Bom Sucesso.

The old roças — Água Izé, Agostinho Neto, Monte Café, and the grand hilltop Roça Sundy on Príncipe, from which Arthur Eddington's 1919 eclipse expedition helped confirm Einstein's theory — can be visited and some are now hotels. The beaches range from the black volcanic sand near the capital to the palm-lined white sand of Príncipe's Praia Banana and the southern islet of Rolas, where a marker sits on the equator.

São Tomé town itself has a small, faded colonial core — a cathedral, a fort, and pastel administrative buildings — and the surrounding waters are good for snorkelling, diving, and, in season, watching humpback whales.