The city was founded in 1493 on an empty island.

01 An island with nobody

It is worth calibrating what that means. Almost every city in the world, colonial ones included, went up on top of something: a village, a crossroads, a natural harbour someone already used. Not here. The island lay some forty kilometres north of the equator, covered in forest, and nobody lived on it.

The consequence is that the city has no earlier layers to uncover. The oldest thing visible is the first thing built: a sixteenth-century cathedral in the centre and the fort of São Sebastião, raised in 1566, which today houses the national museum. Beneath them there is nothing else.

02 Ana Chaves Bay

The chosen site is in the island's northeast, on Ana Chaves Bay, with the small Ilhéu das Cabras offshore. It is a natural shelter, and on an oceanic island with no inherited harbour, that was the entire reason for putting the city exactly there and not at some other point on the coast.

The city is small and remains so. It went from 42,331 inhabitants in 1990 to some 71,868 in 2018, notable growth in relative terms but leaving it at the scale of a mid-sized town. It is walkable end to end without effort, uncommon among capitals.

From the core runs a road that circles practically the whole perimeter of the island. That ring is the infrastructure that organises the country: almost everything worth a journey sits on it or close to it, and from the capital you can reach any point in a few hours.

03 What sugar and cocoa left behind

The island had two successive monocultures and both left built traces. The first was sugar cane: in the sixteenth century, São Tomé became the main centre of sugar production, until Brazilian competition displaced that role. The second, much later, was cocoa.

From that second cycle come the roças, the large agricultural estates spread across the island: complete complexes with warehouses, drying terraces, hospitals, housing and grand estate houses. Many are now partly ruined and are, taken together, the country's most singular built heritage.

In the city itself the inheritance reads in the façades: two-storey buildings with arches at street level, tall windows above, balustrades crowning the roof and render painted pink, yellow and blue, almost all of it showing the passage of time very plainly. It is a degraded and absolutely recognisable ensemble.

04 How it is covered

The old core is done on foot in one long unhurried morning. It is flat, compact and organised around the bay, so it is enough to follow the waterfront and turn inland along the streets leaving it. There is no risk of getting lost and no distances requiring transport.

What really completes the visit is outside: the ring road, the roças spread across the island and the forested interior, which begins the moment you leave the coast. The capital is an excellent starting point precisely because it is so small.

And a note on the calendar that is emphatic here: the dry season, the gravana, runs from June to September, with 19, 0, 1 and 17 millimetres of rain. The rest of the year sees between 81 and 131 millimetres a month. The difference between going in July or in March is enormous.