It is called Beach and it is built on plateaus.

01 A name that does not fit

The reason the city moved uphill is old and simple: height gave protection against the raids the coast suffered between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, and that position ended up giving it the advantage over Ribeira Grande, the island's first settlement. In 1770 it became the capital of the archipelago. In 1858 it was granted city status.

That origin is still legible on the ground. The historic centre sits on a platform with the rock escarpment in plain view, and everything that came later had to be resolved on the neighbouring platforms or in the ravines between them. The city did not spread: it jumped.

02 Achadas

The key word in Praia's plan is achada: Portuguese for a volcanic plateau. And it turns up in half the street directory: Achada de Santo António, Achada de São Filipe, Achada Eugénio Lima, Achada Grande, Achadinha. Each neighbourhood is, literally, a plateau with a name of its own.

For the traveller this has one immediate and unromantic consequence: walking from one neighbourhood to another is almost never flat. You drop into the ravine and climb out again, or you go round. Across 102.6 square kilometres of municipality, distance on the map and effort on the ground are not the same thing.

03 The Plateau and the rest

One of those plateaus has no name of its own: it is simply called Plateau, and it is the centre. Through the nineteenth century it was entirely rebuilt on a grid plan, lined with grand two- and three-storey buildings. It is the part of the city that looks drawn, and the only one.

For a long time, in fact, only the Plateau counted as the city; the other neighbourhoods were relegated to the status of outskirts, even though there was constant movement of people and goods between them. That is why the Plateau is the only place with planned urbanisation from the start, and everything else grew far more organically.

04 From sixty thousand to a hundred and sixty

The figures tell the rest. In 1990 the city had 61,644 inhabitants; in 2000, 94,161; in 2010, 130,271; and in 2017, 159,050. In twenty-seven years it grew two and a half times over, and that growth did not come from the island itself: it came from every island in the archipelago.

The result is an unusual concentration. Some 56% of Cape Verde's entire population now lives on the island of Santiago, and 29% in the municipality of Praia. Which is to say: almost one person in three in the country is here, on these plateaus.

Only after 1975 did the Plateau and the surrounding neighbourhoods merge administratively into what is now called the city of Praia. Before that they were, on paper, separate things; in practice they never entirely were.

One concrete recommendation for the traveller: get to an edge. Any edge. From the rim of an achada you can see the next one, with the green ravine between, and another behind it, and the Atlantic beyond. That is the city's plan, and no map explains it better.