Cape Verde's music soul — morna, mornas, and Atlantic breeze
Mindelo is the port capital of São Vicente island, Cape Verde's cultural and artistic heart — the city that gave the world morna, a melancholic Portuguese-inflected genre of song that UNESCO inscribed in 2019 as an Intangible Cultural Heritage. It was also the birthplace of Cesária Évora, the barefoot diva whose voice brought Cape Verde to global attention in the 1990s. The streets of the colourful colonial quarter fill each February during the Mindelo Carnival, considered the second most vibrant in the world after Rio; the rest of the year the city moves at a gentle pace of café music, grogu…
Mindelo was founded by the Portuguese in the early 16th century as a resupply station for transatlantic voyages; its deep natural harbour made it one of the most important coal-bunkering ports in the world by the mid-19th century when British shipping companies established depots here. The Praça Amilcar Cabral — named for the independence revolutionary assassinated in 1973, one year before Cape Verde achieved independence — anchors the colonial town centre. The island's long contact with sailors, traders, and immigrants from Europe, Brazil, and West Africa layered its music and food into some…