It seemed like the thing to do in São Tomé and Principé was to get out of town, since most of the ship’s tours were bird watching, coffee plantations, waterfalls. That’s usually a clue. And justly so, as it is said to be enhanced with a wealth of natural attractions including palm-fringed beaches, emerald rainforests, plentiful birdlife and abundant endemic plants. In spite of that, anchored just off the capital city of São Tomé, we took the tender into port, in hopes of finding a taxi we could hire to give us a custom tour. And, did I mention that this country lies pretty squarely on the equator, where the climate is either wet or wetter, but always hot? We haggled with the Portuguese-speaking taxi drivers and finally found one who could understand our hand signals enough to just show us the town for a fair enough price.
Formerly uninhabited, the Portuguese grabbed these two tiny volcanic islands in 1575, in search of a suitable place to grow sugar. They built Fort São Sebastião in 1575, which is now a museum with statues of the discoverers outside the fortified walls of this bastion overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. The tiny country of São Tomé and Principé, the second smallest in Africa, became a sovereign nation in 1975.
We circled past the small, haphazard marketplace, to the centerpiece of town and reminder of its long history of Roman Catholicism, the sixteenth century Cathedral, with its simple whitewashed exterior and traditional blue and white Portuguese tile interior details. Across the plaza on one side is the ornately fenced and gated Presidential Palace, and on the other side, the library.
Having exhausted the highlights of the city, and most of our ambition, we headed back to the ship to hear stories from our fellow passengers of the bird watching, coffee plantations, and waterfalls that we should have seen.