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PLACES & SPACES | ROOMS & GARDENS | WORLD OF CABANA
Across São Tomé & Principe’s volcanic hills, abandoned plantation estates (roças) lie abandoned, relics of the African island state's once-prosperous cocoa empire. It's a place where colonial ambition, coerced labor, and sudden independence collided. Crumbling verandas, silent machinery, and encroaching forest reveal the island's layered passage from grandeur to ruin, finds Harrison Thane.
BY HARRISON THANE | ROOMS & GARDENS | 19 MARCH 2026
Abandoned plantation estates are relics of Sao Tome's colonial past © Harrison Thane
Scattered across São Tomé’s volcanic landscape stand the roças plantation estates built under Portuguese rule in the 19th century, once at the heart of the African island’s cocoa empire.
They were designed as complete worlds: drying terraces, administrative houses, workers’ quarters, chapels, schools, and hospitals. Wealth flowed through them, sustained by forced and contracted labor from across the Portuguese colonies.
In 1909, the Cadbury boycott exposed the conditions on these plantations, striking an early blow to São Tomé’s & Principe's reputation as a premier cocoa exporter. Yet the estates endured, and for decades they remained the center of island life.
The true rupture came with independence in 1975. Overnight, the new state nationalized the roças. Cocoa production collapsed as managers and Portuguese owners departed.
By the late 1980s, output had dropped by more than half, and the vast estates (over 150 in total), slipped into decay. Walking among them today is haunting. Wide boulevards shaded by mango trees lead to verandas with broken tiles and factories sit silent, their iron machinery rusting under vines. Dormitories line up with empty iron bedsteads, still intact as if awaiting return. The sensation is a sort of sudden evacuation.
Nature has claimed the upper hand. Banyan roots pierce walls, cacao trees sprout in courtyards, frescoes melt under damp air. Each roça tells of layers of ambition and decline: colonial grandeur, coerced labor, nationalization, failed revivals.
Monté Café, once a proud coffee estate, still carries traces of later experiments and now stands partly as a museum, partly as ruin. Roça Agostinho Neto, the largest of all, remains monumental in its silence. Many roças remain inhabited in fragments, while others stand deserted, but together they trace São Tomé & Principe’s passage, from forced labor to independence, from collapse to the forest’s slow return.
Read More: Postcard from São Tome & Principe
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