Heritage & Culture

The first Creole society formed on these islands, at a port built for the slave trade. The music that came out of it is a music about leaving.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

The national dish is inscribed by UNESCO, and the amount of care that goes into your bowl is a measure of how welcome you have been made.

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 peoples, three landscapes, and a settlement pattern eight centuries old that is still lived in rather than preserved.

Two hundred and eighteen mounds of shells, some hundreds of meters long, heaped up by people eating from the same water for centuries.