Journal

Cape Verde has exactly one UNESCO-inscribed tradition, and it is a form of music about leaving. That turns out not to be a coincidence at all.

Mindelo throws the country's best-known carnival. This page does not tell you when, because nobody we could reach publishes the date.

Cachupa is the national dish and it is built from what the islands could actually grow. It takes a long time on purpose.

We publish no month-by-month table, because we could not source one. Here is what the year is organized around instead, island by island.

People live on the floor of an active volcano with an eight kilometer caldera. In 2014 it erupted, and they are still there.

The first European colonial town in the tropics, a platform for the Atlantic slave trade, and where the first Creole society formed. All one place.

Some experts call this the greatest center of plant biodiversity in the archipelago. It is also where the water is, which is the same story.

Salt pans worked inside an extinct volcano, fed by channels from the sea, on an island whose name is simply the Portuguese for salt.

Cape Verde calls it the camp of slow death. It held prisoners from four countries of the Portuguese empire for more than thirty years.

Gorée is on the World Heritage list for one reason only: what happened there. The criteria line says so, and it is the whole argument.

Three of Senegal's living traditions are inscribed by UNESCO, and one of them is a meal. Culture here is practiced, not displayed.

The largest gathering in Senegal is a religious pilgrimage, and this page publishes no attendance figure for it, because no authority gives one.