But this was Santiago, largest and most African of the Cape Verde islands, 400 miles west of Senegal. The similarities with the mainland abound, not least in the way this former Portuguese colony is currently experiencing another European invasion, this time by package tourists and property developers. Weekly direct flights go from Gatwick and Manchester. It's being touted as the new Canaries, with year-round guaranteed sunshine and beaches to die for.
The brochure writers are not wrong: the coast and weather are gorgeous. But perhaps they should have wrenched themselves away from their beach towels. If they had, they would have got a taste of the cultural hinterland, which is - especially on Santiago - rich and varied and more compelling than anything Tenerife can offer.
At the village, Nilza, our guide, asked Josefa, a 13-year-old who spends most of her time painting weird, pagan scenes to sell to passers-by, whether we could have a chat with the chief. "Spé ra um minutu. Talves okupadu," she said in Creole. And André, who has been chief of Espinho Branco for 30 years, did agree to see us, granting what was by all accounts a rare privilege.
His community of 500 are, to all intents and purposes, the African Amish and direct descendants of the slaves that worked the sugar-cane plantations. They scorn their compatriots' march towards modernity and cling to ancient ways, spurning television and radio and farming their land communally. "We are the real Cape Verdeans, los rebelados," André explained. "I know my ancestors right back to 1533. We fled to the hills to escape the priests and profiteers."
The previous day we'd visited Cidade Velha, the islands' old capital, where the cannons of Fort Real do Sao Filipe still keep watch over the harbour and the ruins of the cathedral, built by the Portuguese in 1556. The dried-up riverbed of Ribeira Grande snakes through a steep gorge, past Nossa Senhora do Rosario, a cool white church with delicate Portuguese tiles, where Francis Drake came to pray before torching a couple of towns. Nearby are thatched cottages, thought to be 500 years old, their gardens full of cacti, and beyond them fields of maize, and plantations of bananas and papaya. The contrast in landscape in the space of just five miles is as extreme as anything we'd ever seen: lush one moment, desert the next.
But the most arresting monument to the past is an uncomfortable one: the 16th-century pillory, which on the face of it is an innocent-looking post set in the village square. Only the iron rings and bars point to the cruelty meted out to thousands of slaves who suffered the indignity of being tied up for 72 hours to see how they survived before being put on sale.
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