Els Slots

The Netherlands - 16-Feb-25 -

Like Cidade Velha WHS, the Tarrafal Concentration Camp lies on the main island of Cabo Verde: Santiago. It can be reached by public minibus (aluguer) from the capital Praia; they leave when full from a street near the Estado da Varzea. The 1.5h drive (600escudos) is quite pretty, as it crosses a landscape full of volcanic peaks and the Serra Malagueta Natural Park. The former Concentration Camp lies next to the main road, 2km before the town entrance of Tarrafal. 

The Tarrafal Concentration Camp has been on the road to nomination for a long time. In recent years the initiative has picked up speed again, but at the moment of writing it is unknown whether they have submitted a dossier in time for the 2026 WHC. The latest news item from April 2024 underlines the government's commitment and mentions that support has been sought from Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Portugal (the three other countries that had political prisoners incarcerated here) to create a transnational candidacy. That support will be moral and financial I guess, I don’t think additional components in those countries will be added. 

The site itself, which requires a modest 200 escudos (1,90 EUR) entrance fee, has been ready for an international audience already for a couple of years. It was on the World Monuments Watch of 2006, turned into a museum in 2009 and fully restored with Portuguese help in 2021. It now looks much better preserved than in earlier photos and seems to have gotten a recent fresh brush of yellow paint. There is a direct foot and bike path towards the beach town of Tarrafal, and when I visited there were about a dozen other foreign tourists around. Most of the interpretation on site is in Portuguese, French and English. 

The camp was modelled after Nazi concentration camps: the Portuguese fascist rulers even went on work visits for inspiration. You will recognize the straight sight lines. From the gate, an interpretative circuit now starts passing through the administrative annexes, via the infirmary (photo top right) with notoriously few medicines on offer, into the prison complex. Here the prisoners were housed in pavilions, separated by origin. Their colonies of origin had to pay for their upkeep, which resulted in slightly better meals for some than for others. But conditions overall were very poor, people essentially were left to rot in this location specifically chosen for its remoteness and unhealthy climate.

The focus of the site, renamed “Museum of Resistance”, seems to be mostly on the second phase of its use: the period from 1962-1974 when anti-colonial prisoners were kept here. As such, it belongs to the collective memory of the peoples of “Portuguese Africa”. 

Personally, I don’t have an issue with sites of memory like this on the WH List as long as they include authentic, tangible remains (so not on criterion VI only). It doesn’t have to be pretty - it’s not an architecture award or a beauty contest. The suggested lapse of time to put things into historical perspective, 50 years, has occurred here (the camp closed in 1975). A visit gets you thinking about the place of Cabo Verde in the world in the 19th and 20th centuries, similar to what Cidade Velha did for the 15th to 17th centuries. The archipelago was extremely poor at the time, suffering from severe droughts and agricultural crises. “The goats taught us to eat stones so we wouldn’t perish” a poem displayed on the site remembers. People emigrated en masse to Europe and the US. So it was with tragic irony that political prisoners were sent the other way, to Cabo Verde.

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Wojciech Fedoruk

Poland - 01-Aug-18 -

From the perspective of Praia, the capital of Cape Verde, the town of Tarrafal is located exactly on the opposite side of the island of Santiago. Although the distance is only 60 kilometers, it can take as long as 1.5h by car and even up to 3h by minibus, called here aluguer. We chose the latter, adding to the adventure. You have to ask the driver to stop near the camp, which is in the outskirts of the town of Tarrafal, near the main road.

The Camp was founded in 1936 in the times of the exemplary Catholic, dictator of the Portuguese empire Antonio de Olivieira Salazar and functioned (with a 7-year break) until April 25, 1974, the memorable day of the Portuguese Carnation Revolution. The location was not accidental, because at that time Tarrafal was the real end of the world - the islands were completely isolated, but at the same time they were almost in the middle of the empire, at the junction of sea routes. The nearest neighborhood was rarely settled, and most importantly, the water sources were extremely scarce and easy to control. Therefore, escape was very difficult, hence there were no such cases in the history of the camp. Tarrafal was a place of isolation of the opponents of the regime from all over the empire - except for the Portuguese, independence activists from Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau and Cabo Verde itself were also imprisoned here. In the camp, basically, everything was designed to make the prisoners' lives uncomfortable - from isolates warming up to 50 degrees in the sun, to purposely infested food served in the local kitchen. Through all this, Tarrafal deserved the name Camp of Slow Death (Campo da Morte Lenta). Although modeled on Nazi camps, Tarrafal was definitely less deadly - for so many years of functioning, "only" 32 prisoners did not survive it, and after 1948, there were no deaths at all.

The camp infrastructure has survived to this day in a good condition, although almost nothing but the walls have been preserved inside the buildings. There is also scant information about the functioning of the camp itself. Maybe it will change before the official nomination (now postponed until 2020) although one may wonder if (and why) places like this should be inscribed.