49 Fun Facts About Sao Tome and Principe

Sao Tome and Principe lies in which body of water off Central Africa?

The Gulf of Guinea: its seabed may hold large oil reserves, so the islands, long dependent on aid and a single export crop, began selling offshore exploration rights in the late 1990s.

Sao Tome and Principe is Africa's second-smallest and second-least populous state after which country?

Seychelles alone is smaller in both area and population. Sao Tome and Principe's home market is so tiny that manufacturing has never taken hold, and the country imports most of what it uses, food included.

Who was living on Sao Tome and Principe when Portuguese explorers arrived around 1470?

Nobody at all: the islands were empty, so Portugal had to people its new colony from scratch, with unwilling settlers shipped from home and enslaved Africans brought from the mainland.

Sao Tome's early settlers included about 2,000 of what, deported by the Portuguese crown?

Jewish children: the crown had them taken from their parents, baptised and shipped out to help people the new colony, alongside convicts sent out from Portugal.

Which crop drove Sao Tome's 16th-century boom, grown on plantations worked by enslaved Africans?

Sugar made the island rich for a few decades, until bigger plantations across the Atlantic undercut its poorly dried product and the trade collapsed.

Amador, the leader of Sao Tome's great slave revolt of 1595, proclaimed himself what?

King: Amador's rebels wrecked most of the island's mills and nearly overran the colony before the militia beat them. The Portuguese executed him; today he is honoured as a national hero.

In the early 1900s Sao Tome was, for a time, the world's largest producer of what?

Cocoa: in 1909 Cadbury and other European chocolate makers stopped buying the islands' beans in protest at the slave-like recruitment of plantation workers from Angola.

Sao Tome's plantation estates, whose managers held near-total power over their workers, were known as what?

Rocas outlived slavery: after abolition in the 1870s the estates carried on with 'contract' workers shipped from Angola, in conditions widely denounced as slavery under another name.

Which physicist observed the May 1919 solar eclipse from Principe to test general relativity?

Arthur Eddington photographed stars beside the eclipsed Sun through gaps in the cloud; their shifted positions matched Einstein's prediction and made Einstein world-famous.

What sparked the 1953 Batepa massacre of hundreds of islanders on Sao Tome?

Fears of forced plantation work: rumour had it the labour-starved governor would conscript free islanders for the estates. The killings became a rallying cry for independence and are mourned every 3 February.

How did Sao Tome and Principe win independence from Portugal in 1975?

Negotiated handover: the liberation movement was a small band of exiles that never mounted a guerrilla campaign on the islands, so the terms were settled at the conference table.

Who was Sao Tome and Principe's first president, also credited with designing its flag?

Manuel Pinto da Costa led the country for its first 16 years, retired, then returned to win the presidency again in 2011 at the age of 74.

What on Sao Tome and Principe's flag represents its two islands?

Black stars: two sit on the yellow band, one for each island. The design was lifted almost unchanged from the independence movement's banner, with only the yellow band widened.

Sao Tome and Principe was among the first African countries to do what in 1990?

Legalise opposition parties: a new constitution ended 15 years of one-party rule, and at the free elections of 1991 the governing party lost and handed over power peacefully.

What is the highest point in Sao Tome and Principe?

Pico de Sao Tome rises 2,024 metres; the streams that pour off it in every direction give the island its many waterfalls but no large river.

Pico Cao Grande, the needle-like landmark of southern Sao Tome, is what kind of formation?

A volcanic plug: lava hardened in the throat of an old volcano, then erosion stripped away the softer cone around it and left the core standing as a tower over the rainforest.

Which line crosses Ilheu das Rolas, an islet off southern Sao Tome?

The Equator: a Portuguese survey led by the navigator Gago Coutinho in the 1910s proved that the line crosses the islet, where a monument now lets visitors stand in both hemispheres at once.

Sao Tome and Principe sit on which volcanic chain, shared with Bioko, Annobon and a famous mainland peak?

The Cameroon Line is a 1,600 km row of volcanoes running from the open Atlantic deep into the mainland; only Mount Cameroon still erupts, while the islands themselves have been quiet for centuries.

Sao Tome's southern rainforest is the only home of the rare 'dwarf' species of which bird?

Ibis: the dwarf ibis feeds on the forest floor and nests in the trees, and it is now among the island's most endangered birds because it is hunted and the old rainforest it depends on keeps shrinking.

In 2025 Sao Tome and Principe became the first country to lie entirely within what kind of UNESCO site?

A biosphere reserve: Principe, rich in species found nowhere else, earned the status in 2012, and adding the larger island in 2025 put the whole nation inside one.

What is the currency of Sao Tome and Principe?

The dobra replaced the colonial escudo in 1977; years of inflation later forced the central bank to knock three zeros off it, swapping 1,000 old dobras for one new one in 2018.

Since 2010 Sao Tome and Principe's currency has been pegged to which other currency?

The euro: Portugal signed a deal in 2009 to support the peg, as it had a decade earlier for another former colony, giving the tiny economy a fixed rate with its main trading partners.

Which Portuguese-based creole has by far the most speakers in Sao Tome and Principe?

Forro means 'freed' in Portuguese: the creole grew up among the colony's freed slaves and their descendants.

The Angolares of Sao Tome are said to descend from Angolan slaves who survived what in the 1540s?

A shipwreck, in the traditional telling: the survivors struggled ashore on the island's wild south coast and founded a free community of their own, though historians still argue over the story.

What is the largest religion in Sao Tome and Principe?

Catholicism came with the first Portuguese settlers; five centuries on it is still the majority faith, though many islanders blend its rites with traditional African beliefs.

The 16th-century Fort Sao Sebastiao, on the harbour of Sao Tome city, was converted to house what?

The National Museum: built to guard the port against pirate raids, the fort now displays religious art and relics of colonial life, while the lighthouse on its walls still guides ships.

What status has Principe held within Sao Tome and Principe since 1995?

Autonomous region: parliament voted the remote island self-rule in 1994, and since the following year a regional government in Santo Antonio has run its local affairs.

What happened to the Portuguese-owned plantations after Sao Tome and Principe became independent in 1975?

They were nationalised: the estates, covering most of the farmland, became 15 state enterprises, but harvests collapsed and in the 1990s the land was broken up among smallholders.

In 2001 Sao Tome and Principe agreed to explore for oil jointly with which country?

Nigeria: the two countries' sea claims overlapped, so they pooled the disputed waters rather than argue over the border, though the hoped-for oil boom has yet to arrive.

Which international broadcaster built a relay station on Sao Tome to reach radio listeners across Africa?

Voice of America chose the island because transmitters there, just off the continent's west coast, can reach much of Africa; the two governments signed a long-term deal for the site in 1992.

The Angolares, a community on Sao Tome's south coast, have traditionally made their living how?

Fishing: the Angolares long kept apart from the plantations in the island's far south, and an encyclopaedia of 1911 already described them as 'expert fishermen and canoemen'.

Contract workers shipped from which fellow Portuguese colony left Sao Tome and Principe with its largest immigrant community?

Cape Verde: its islanders were shipped in on labour contracts after slavery was abolished, and many of their descendants stayed on for good and took Sao Tomean nationality.

Which crop was Sao Tome's main export for much of the 19th century, until another overtook it in the 1890s?

Coffee: the new plantations pulled the colony's wealth back to the bigger island, and in 1852 the capital returned there from Principe after a century away.

Tchiloli, Sao Tome's masked street theatre, retells a trial before which emperor?

Charlemagne: in the 16th-century Portuguese play behind tchiloli, the emperor must judge his own son for murder and sends him to his death; all-male masked troupes still perform it today.

Sao Tomean poet Alda Espirito Santo, later a government minister, wrote the words of what?

The national anthem, 'Independencia total': the colonial authorities had jailed her in the 1960s for backing the independence cause, and after 1975 she went on to chair the National Assembly.

Sao Tome was a main base for the 1960s airlift that flew food to which blockaded breakaway state?

Biafra: church relief planes took off by night from the then Portuguese island and landed on a bush airstrip in the starving enclave; the airlift is credited with saving a million lives or more.

Which seafaring rivals captured Sao Tome from Portugal in 1641?

The Dutch took the island in the same campaign that seized Luanda, but their admiral, Cornelis Jol, caught malaria there and died before the year was out.

Sao Tome and Principe recognised which government in 2016, switching its diplomatic ties?

The People's Republic of China won the islands back after 19 years: they had switched to Taiwan in 1997, a move the president pushed through against his own government, and Beijing had cut ties in reply.

Why is south-western Sao Tome far wetter than the north-east?

Mountains block the wet winds: they blow in from the south-west and dump several metres of rain a year on that side, leaving the capital, in the north-east, in a rain shadow with a real dry season.

How did the bloodless coup that toppled Sao Tome and Principe's government in July 2003 end?

A deal restored the president: after a week of talks the junta stood down in return for an amnesty and the promise of a law to keep future oil income out of corrupt hands.

Which city is home to the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, the bloc Sao Tome and Principe helped found in 1996?

Lisbon: seven states founded the bloc there in 1996, two decades after Portugal's empire broke up, and a 2021 mobility pact lets members ease entry and residence rules for one another's citizens.

On Sao Tome, a conservation programme finds new livelihoods for people who once hunted which animals?

Sea turtles: the Tato programme patrols the island's nesting beaches, and visitors can join its guides to watch the females come ashore and lay their eggs.

The 'giant' species found only in Sao Tome's mountain forests belongs to which family of nectar-feeding birds?

Sunbirds are the Old World's answer to hummingbirds, and on isolated Sao Tome one grew so large and odd that scientists give it a genus of its own; it lives only in the island's high forest.

Which April 1974 event in Portugal sped Sao Tome and Principe toward independence?

The overthrow of the Caetano dictatorship, the Carnation Revolution, brought to power officers tired of fighting colonial wars; by the end of 1975 all five of Portugal's African colonies were independent.

Bioko and Annobon, island neighbours that Portugal traded away in 1778, now belong to which country?

Equatorial Guinea: Portugal swapped the two islands to Spain for land in South America, which is why Sao Tome and Principe's nearest island neighbours speak Spanish.

In which nearby country did Sao Tome and Principe's independence movement set up its base?

Gabon: the exiles founded their liberation committee in 1960 and eventually ran it from this newly independent neighbour, close to home but beyond Portugal's reach.

Which former prime minister returned from exile to win Sao Tome and Principe's 1991 presidential election?

Miguel Trovoada had been the first prime minister until the president scrapped his post and jailed him for 21 months; after years of exile in France he came home and won as an independent.

Roughly how many people lived on Principe in 2018, out of a national total near 202,000?

About 8,400, fewer than one Sao Tomean in twenty: the smaller island gives the country half its name, yet forest has reclaimed most of its old plantations and almost everyone lives on the larger one.

Which Portuguese navigators first landed on Sao Tome and Principe around 1470?

João de Santarém and Pêro Escobar sailed for Fernão Gomes, a Lisbon merchant whose royal trading lease obliged him to explore 100 leagues of new African coast every year.