PARADISE RECLAIMED

A natural Eden in a remote archipelago off West Africa, the island of Príncipe is throwing off a troubled colonial past to tell new stories

- Catherine Fairweather

Today I am where I want to be, strolling along almond-fringed beaches that, like cuffs of lace, fall from the dark sleeve of the jungle.

Steam rises after a recent downpour and morning sunlight glances off cresting waves silver-threaded with the shoals of sardinella that ride their swell. Coconuts drop with a thud around me and begonia blossoms spiral slowly. This is a fecund forest of vastness that's so alive you can practically hear the sap rising. I have been walking for more than an hour from my tented suite at the Sundy Praia retreat and seen no one.

I have padded across sandbanks in the flipper trail of turtles who have come to lay their eggs on these northern shores, and clambered over rocky headlands. I've scaled the heights and pushed through the insect drill-of the forest, into the shade of the towering oka. These trees have a presence not unlike Tolkien's ents, those humanoid-like tree creatures.

In Príncipe, it is customary to bury a newborn baby's placenta beneath a trunk, so that everyone has a tree they consider their own. The forest is venerated and it is sacrilege to fell a tree, a belief embedded in law.

If the idea of heaven were as simple as a deserted beach and the freedom to roam safely, then Príncipe, a remote island in the Gulf of Guinea, is that lost Eden. During the pandemic, I dreamed of returning to this poor but paradisiacal island that I first heard about from my father who was absentee British ambassador there during the 1980s, after it gained its independence from the Portuguese.