The island nation of São Tomé and Príncipe is raising its profile

They feel like a lost world, these two islands, marooned beyond the horizon – some curious cross between Robinson Crusoe’s landfall and our dreams of Shangri-La.

A fisherman in Agulhas Bay, Príncipe. Picture: Scott Ramsay.

They feel like a lost world, these two islands, marooned beyond the horizon – some curious cross between Robinson Crusoe’s landfall and our dreams of Shangri-La. The fact they seem so peripheral, so inconsequential, makes their coordinates startling: 225 kilometres off the coast of Africa, the islands are closer to the exact centre of the measured globe, to the junction of zero degrees of both longitude and latitude, than any other territory on Earth. Imagination may make São Tomé and Príncipe a remote fantasy, but atlases mark them almost dead centre.

They may have been too small for Mark Shuttleworth to spot through the oval window of the spacecraft in April of 2002. A multimillionaire South African, who made his fortune in the tech industry, Shuttleworth was the second space tourist, paying $US20 million and enduring seven months training for a week in cramped conditions on a Soyuz mission. As with most people who have seen the planet floating in the vast black void of space, he was deeply affected by the experience. Back on Earth, he wanted to do something positive for the mother ship, for Mother Earth. His search for some corner of the globe where he might have a beneficial impact brought him to São Tomé and Príncipe.

For 30 million years or more, sea turtles were the only visitors to these two islands. Lush, tropical, verdant, they were a terrestrial paradise, an Eden without Adam and Eve to bugger things up. No one lived here until the Portuguese turned up, in 1470, when the islands became a remote outpost of that creakiest of enterprises – the Portuguese Empire. The colonists planted sugar cane and brought slaves from the African mainland as plantation workers.

Spool forward almost exactly five centuries, to 1975, and a new generation of Portuguese politicians realised their empire was way past its sell-by date. Overnight the colonists packed up, taking with them everything that could be bundled aboard a ship, and went home. As the plantations grew ragged and overgrown, as the old planter’s mansions – known as roças – slowly fell into picturesque ruin, one of the world’s smallest countries was born. Today, São Tomé and Príncipe has a population of just over 200,000 inhabitants and a trickle of luxury tourists who carry home stories of idyllic islands at the centre of the world.

The Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição in Santo António. Picture: Scott Ramsay.

A walkway over the emerald waters at Bom Bom resort. Picture: Henrique Seruca.

When Shuttleworth arrived, keen to protect the rainforest and the reefs of these islands, he understood the role that tourism could play in promoting the preservation rather than the exploitation of nature. Investing philanthropic millions in revitalising the reefs and the rainforests of Príncipe, he created high-end, low-impact tourist facilities that would bring employment to the islanders so they would not be tempted by logging or trawling, by overfishing or agricultural monocultures.

As with all the best places, getting here is not entirely straightforward. Flights arriving from Lisbon, via Accra, take about six hours to São Tomé, the capital and the larger of the two islands. I emerged from the tiny terminal to air heavy with the aroma of mangoes and sea. A ramshackle golf-cart taxi took me into town, a drive of five minutes. Palm trees and sand beaches lined the shore. I fell for São Tomé immediately as I followed a meandering road round the coast, curving past empty beaches and ramshackle fishing villages and roadside stalls piled with papayas and mangoes. Traffic was largely pedestrian – women carrying a hundredweight of bananas on their heads and babies on their backs, men pushing bicycles uphill with fish hanging from the crossbar. Dogs slept in the middle of the road, busy pigs scurried along the verges, and goats jaywalked. The day felt sun-splashed and blessed.

But my devotion to São Tomé only lasted as long as the 30-minute flight, in an antique propeller plane, to the smaller island of Príncipe. I realised I had fallen for the wrong island. Príncipe was the dream, the island paradise of hammocks and tropical plants and lazy afternoons and deserted beaches. With barely 7000 people living in viridescent rural tranquillity, Príncipe suddenly made São Tomé seem about as quiet as Hong Kong. In São Tomé, the advice is always leve-leve – literally “slowly slowly”, in the sense of take it easy. In Príncipe this is replaced by móle-móle. It’s for people who find “slowly slowly” just that little bit too rushed.

A guest room at Roça Sundy, a former plantation house. Picture: Geraldine Bruneel.

The Príncipe weaver, one of the many birds endemic to the island. Picture: Joshua Bergmark.

Príncipe may be the junior partner in this two-island nation, but for visitors it’s the star turn. Its isolation from the African mainland has meant it has more endemic species per square kilometre than any place on Earth. There are beaches that would impress a Brazilian, dance steps – the kizomba and the tarraxinha – that would make a Cuban blush, vegetation more riotous than the Amazon (half the island is tropical rainforest), a fine local drink, micôco, said to be “very good for the penis”, and the world’s best chocolate, sold at Fortnum & Mason in London. Oh, and a fascinating creature – sadly only seen by a handful of possibly deranged people – called a goo-goo that eats eggs and poos gold.

It is on Príncipe that Shuttleworth’s enterprise – known as HBD, short for Here be Dragons – has developed three tourist properties. Bom Bom, a delightful old-fashioned resort in fragrant gardens on the northern shore, sits astride two beaches. Sundy Praia, a five-star tented lodge on a remote beach, has brought a whole new level of sophistication to Príncipe. And, finally, Roça Sundy, a former plantation house, completes the trio. I was staying in Roça Sundy. In its high-ceilinged rooms, I slipped effortlessly into a pastiche of colonial lifestyle. In the evenings I sipped Daiquiris on the terrace, dined alone in candlelit splendour, and then smoked cigars in the gathering dusk. Over breakfast, I read three-month-old newspapers while realising, with a slightly sore head, one of the dangers of the plantation house – an excess of Daiquiris.

Daiquiris aside, one of the charms of Roça Sundy is that the workers’ quarters are still inhabited by Príncipean families. The terreiro, the long central grassy courtyard around which the old plantation buildings are set, was as lively as an Italian piazza in the hour of the passeggiata. Scattering chickens, boys chased footballs, girls skipped rope while toddlers clambered over a defunct steam engine. Beneath the vast mango trees, men sat idling on benches while women cleaned house, bathed children, carried firewood, fetched water, cooked lunch, weeded gardens, planted corn and generally kept the world turning.

Lounge area at Roça Sundy, a former plantation house. Picture: Geraldine Bruneel.

As móle-móle as I could, I set off to explore the island. I picnicked on empty crescent beaches. I followed red-earth roads through exuberant jungle. I took boats to remote peninsulas just to listen to the spectacular birdsong. I went to church on Sunday morning in the toy-town capital of Santo António, and found myself in a swaying chorus line of god’s backing singers as the island dogs wandered in to have a snooze beneath the high altar. At Praia Abade it was the villagers who were snoozing, in hammocks, while the village boys, glossy as seals, somersaulted into the waves. One man woke to say hello. Luís was an émigré from São Tomé. He stretched his arms to encompass the long beach with the fishing boats drawn up, the leaning palm trees, the wide blue bay. “You know why I stay?” he asked. “Because time stands still here.” Móle-móle had got to him.

The old plantations occupy the northern half of Príncipe. The southern half of the island – the whole island is barely 20 kilometres long – is virgin forest. To islanders, it is as remote and exotic as Outer Mongolia. To me, it felt like a lost world halfway between Tolkien’s Middle Earth and Gaugin’s South Sea paradise. Spectacular volcanic towers of phonolite thrust up through the jungle canopy, rising hundreds of metres above the treetops, while flat-topped mesas and mountains dominate the skyline.

I took a boat to this outback, with flying fish darting from beneath our bows, and went ashore to trek along jungle trails, keeping an eye out for the illusive goo-goo. Never having come to see humans as predators, the astonishing birdlife – and there are 26 unique species on Príncipe – was strangely tame, giving the place a dream-like quality. A kingfisher perched a few metres away, cocking his head to get a good look at me. Finches gathered about me, settling on branches close to hand, while a golden weaver alighted near my elbow, a piece of dry grass in his beak, ready to weave into his long hanging nest.

Underwater, when I went snorkelling, the dream continued. With warm currents and excellent visibility, Príncipe’s seas, now a Unesco Biosphere Reserve, are as pristine and as little explored as the land. A National Geographic expedition here in 2006 discovered 60 new fish, including 10 from completely unknown species. I gazed down at 2.5-metre nurse sharks hovering over beds of seagrass in shimmering aqueous light. I watched silvery barracuda holding stationary with the merest flick of their tails. Beyond a reef of pale rock, I spotted a spectacular Atlantic sailfish, its huge dorsal fin hoisted to the currents. With a turn of my head, I glimpsed colourful parrotfish grazing on algae, bloated pufferfish comically struggling to keep themselves upright in the wash above the reefs, and shoals of yellowtail sardinella, wheeling this way and that like well-drilled regiments.

Baby turtles on Príncipe. Picture: Maique Madeira.

Agulhas Bay on Príncipe Island. Picture: Scott Ramsay.

In Mosteiros Bay, I found sea turtles swimming earnestly towards their birthplaces, their little startled faces gazing up at me through shafts of refracted light. In the water they seemed tireless and effortless. On these islands, turtles take the place of lions. Creatures of legend and myth, they are seen as heroic, and people speak of someone with courage as having the heart of a turtle.

At Roça Paciência, an overgrown plantation abandoned over 40 years ago, I found Leandro, like a lingering ghost. He was 80 years old. In one of the empty storerooms he was weaving basket lampshades for the HBD properties – just the kind of traditional craft that the hotels support. We chatted as his antique hands looped the long strands of reed in and out of the struts. Through the doorway I could see glamorous birds with long silky tails swooping across the old plantation lawns. The sound of the Atlantic pounding some pristine beach drifted up to us through the trees. “People say we are far away, that this is a remote place,” Leandro said. “But actually this is the centre of the world. It is everyone else who is far away.”

At midnight, I followed paths beneath overhanging trees to Praia Grande, a nesting beach for turtles. In the moonlight several lumbered out of the waves, including an enormous leatherback about two metres across. Most will have travelled thousands of kilometres from distant oceans to reach this beach, where they were born. For the turtles, too, these remote islands are the centre of the world.

TAP Air Portugal operates flights from Lisbon to São Tomé (flytap.com). For more on the accommodation on Príncipe see hbdprincipe.com