People cannot resist fire for long. Once in a while, it reminds us of its rapid, uncheckable viciousness. Because it also heals and reinvigorates through its destruction, we always come back. But the threat remains.
Fogo Island rises raw and rugged three hundred miles off the coast of West Africa, the top ten thousand feet of an active volcano forming a patch of arable land fifteen miles across and flat in only one place. That flat place is the caldera, the crater of the volcano, where eons of successive eruptions have created a landscape so brutal and shattered that very little can survive. The caldera lured us here, convincing us to brave the fights with airline officials, the constant warnings that we would not make it back to Praia to catch our fight back to Dakar, and the eventual return to Dakar a day late for work. We came for the natural beauty, but also because of a curious fact about the caldera: people live here.
The community of Cha de Calderas has rebuilt itself twice in my lifetime. People live here because the soil is highly fertile, full of minerals brought up from inside the earth, allowing them to grow cash crops such as wine grapes; and because tourism brings in extra cash. Their decision is a desperate gamble: you cannot look anywhere in the caldera without seeing the signs of eruption, most intimidatingly the looming Pico de Fogo, a thousand-foot stratovolcano of its own within the caldera. The main cone that forms Fogo last erupted in the 17th century, causing mass emigration from the island (which had previously been one of the most economically important in Cape Verde, a position to which it has never recovered). Smaller eruptions from volcanoes within the caldera have followed constantly. In 1995, Cha de Calderas evacuated during a minor eruption which destroyed most homes in the town. The people came back, re-planted, sought tourism, and the boom time was on, until the volcano came alive again in 2014. The people left again; thick lava covered nearly all of their homes, the top of whose roofs remain visible through the rubble. And then the people came back. We wanted to see what it felt like to be in a town built upon the visible remnants of its destruction, with the cause of that destruction even more visible, looming, ready to strike again.
Our drive into the caldera was surreal, breathtaking, and deeply unsettling. We came up endless winding roads through green, idyllic fields and small towns, leaving the sea far below us. When there was nowhere higher to go, we came around a corner and found ourselves in a brutal world of wind, rock, and cloud. The caldera walls filled our vision to the left, brown-grey, most of a thousand feet high, to our left, with strange, smooth, dark clouds spilling and shifting over the lip. The Pico rose to our right, higher and darker still, with a massive disc-cloud forming and whipping around its summit. The ground was made of tortured rock: chunks the size of cars and houses, sharp as knives, jumbled, with no visual line to follow and no comforting softness whatsoever. The road looked pitiful in this landscape, destined to be swept away. And we followed it into the caldera, towards the people who call this place home.
We spent two nights in the Caldera among the people of Cha, who are normal and light-hearted and perhaps most unsurprisingly, rational. Most narratives we heard in the tourist material indicated that people live here because it is their home, and there’s some indefinable pull in that; and we certainly saw that that is the case for some people here, but it’s not the strongest factor. Most people in Cha are making a hard calculation. They look at their prospects in Cape Verde and see limited opportunities in this archipelago with so little arable land. They compare that to their chances in the brutal, beautiful paradise of the Caldera, where the science and more importantly their intuition will let them evacuate in time to save their lives but not their livelihoods. They find that the life in the Caldera, even if it will only last 15 or 20 or 50 years, is better- for them.
And they dig out the rubble to clear spaces for their houses. And they do their laundry. And they tend their crops, and guide tourists up the Pico, and get together at night to play music in th biggest re-built building, and buy secondhand clothes from the truck that comes up from the market once a week, and use their phones to maintain the connection between their own tiny place in the world and the rest of it. And the wheel of life keeps turning in the Cha.