Cabo Verde

Cabo Verde, known in English as Cape Verde and officially the Republic of Cabo Verde, is an archipelagic country of ten volcanic islands in the eastern Atlantic Ocean off the coast of West Africa, positioned 600 to 850 kilometers west of Dakar, Senegal, and covering approximately 4,033 square kilometers. Praia is its capital and largest city, and the 2021 population of about 491,233 makes Cabo Verde one of Africa's least populous countries, with a substantial diaspora in the United States and Portugal; the population traces its ancestry mainly to West African groups and Portuguese settlers, and Portuguese is the official language alongside the national Cabo Verdean Creole. Portuguese explorers discovered the previously uninhabited islands around 1456, and Ribeira Grande, established in 1462, became the first permanent European settlement in the tropics; Cabo Verde gained independence from Portugal on 5 July 1975. Cabo Verde is a stable semi-presidential representative democratic republic, with a president elected for five-year terms as head of state and a prime minister as head of government under the National Assembly, and has become one of the most developed and democratic countries in Africa despite lacking significant natural resources.