Testimony

We had to share this magnificent text, a testimony of two people who, on their second vist to Ponta Bicuda, describe the environment and the ongoing works with real enthousiasm:

The second time

We had been here before – a little more than a year ago – to see the moonish landscape of Ponta Bicuda. It was burned into brown, we saw stones, rocks, dust, sand and in between: Some courageous leaves and flowers.
We had seen the trucks and construction machines arrive, and we had felt the dust move ever deeper into our throats and cameras as land-shaping began.
Now in April of 2009, we revisited to see a new landscape: – That of Coladera and Teiju –. Part of Cor de Mar was still in gigantic rocks, but the site for the hotel, the cricket field and the spa-lake all ready for the next steps. Ponta Bicuda is rising from it’s moonish grounds. It is amazing.
Land had been levelled out into shelves wider than those fit for corn growing on the inlands of Cape Verde. The idea is nevertheless the same: this is for human feet to move on.
Like last time we were here, we were treated like queens and kings. Helder Ribeiro is the perfect host for luxury second home clients like us – never nagging, always pleasant.
As we stood there on our future shelf overlooking the horizon in about 270 degrees angle, we felt that this place will be fit for queens – or kings – if you like.
What then about Santiago, the basic host of the Ponta Bicuda insula? What about the people, what about the languages of Creole and Portuguese?
Elder Ribeiro has taken us all around Santiago – an island of diverse landscapes loaded with beauty. After the rainy season (in August and September), the whole Island, like a magic stroke of a green brush, dresses itself in green. We have seen it with green mountain ridges – green out of condensations from the clouds as they climb the mountain slopes, we have seen brownish mountain sides baked by the sun and sheer, green “Shangri Las” at the bottoms of the valleys, where farmers pump water from the ground.
The people of Cape Verde seem proud and pragmatic realising that this archipelago has little to offer when it comes to natural resources apt to export: most of what we consume here is imported. The climate, the sun and some other major resources: the music, the friendliness and not least the pride are, however, worth the world. To better or worse, this is seems also part of the Cape Verdean people’s insights.
A people that can make life possible under such natural challenges has to be proud and must develop a well grounded love for their land. As a visitor willing to take part in public life, that love is readily felt in all encounters, be they conveyed in English (spoken well enough by many) in Portuguese (the official language) or in Creole. Creole is the language Cape Verdeans share among each other. It is Portuguese enough to pay a kind of tribute to history and African enough to make Cape Verdeans to what they really are: Queens and Kings of their beautiful archipelago.
May we all come to live well together as fit for these special kinds of “royalties”.

Esben Esther Pirelli Benestad