Living in Cape Verde | How People Live Where Half the Country Left | 4K Travel Documentary

Ten volcanic islands in the Atlantic, four hundred miles off West Africa. Not one river on any of them. Around eight inches of rain a year. Half a million people live there. Between seven hundred thousand and a million live somewhere else. That is not a margin of error. More of this nation lives beyond its own borders than inside them, and it has been that way for over a hundred years. The first clue isn't on the islands at all. It's on a working pier in New Bedford, Massachusetts, where the language coming off the fishing boats has been spoken longer than most families in that city have been in America — and where a black-hulled wooden schooner is still tied up, the last survivor of a fleet that Cape Verdean sailors bought secondhand and ran across three thousand six hundred miles of open ocean for seventy years. They were not passenger liners. They were the way out. What follows is the story of what drove people onto those ships, what they sent back in place of themselves, and why a country that watched most of its own population walk out the door refuses to treat that as a loss. There are ten islands in the archipelago. Cape Verdeans count eleven.