Business is booming as Britons and Irish beat the Italians in the race to buy on the islands

The Bulgarian bubble may be deflating fast, but Cape Verde s is still swelling with punters convinced these remote islands point the path to riches. At the end of last year, direct weekly flights began from Gatwick, Manchester and Dublin and the Overseas property market is soaring.

Italians were the first to pay attention to Cape Verde when Mussolini built the airstrip on the island of Sal as a short hop to like-minded dictators in Latin America and they are still doing good business. In what must be one of the great overseas property investments, Andrea Stefanina a property developer from Brescia bought about six miles of Sal's coastline and flew in tourists on charter flights from the early Nineties.

But even he was surprised by the property-acquiring appetites of the British and Irish. Of 300 apartments at the Djadsal Moradias development at Santa Maria which were intended for Italian sunlovers and surfers, Britons and Irish have snapped up 220.
"Business is really good, says Fabrizio Fabbri, a diving instructor turned-estate agent with Stefanina s Turinvest (www.turinvestimobilia.com). There are now plans to build fancy villas, a golf course and a marina at Pedra de Lume, near the old salt flats that gave Sal its name.

Equally exotic is the Sambala development on the main island Santiago (www.sambaladevelopments.com). This is a 5,000-acre site acquired by Daniel Grepne, an Anglo-Norwegian shipping tycoon, in the Sixties following an underwriting loss.

An eco-community of villas, apartments and townhouses, Sambala has already sold 500 units, some of which will be ready in February. The hugely ambitious scheme, which includes golf courses and hotels, is marketed from the Cotswolds in Cornbury Park, Charlbury.

Whereas Sal is all but a desert island with beautiful beaches, Santiago has the historic remains of Portugal s occupation since 1460, plus mountains and greenery. But the subsistence economy of Cape Verde is on your doorstep and there are no direct flights from the UK.

Another major player in Cape Verde is Tom Sheehy, a furniture supplier from Cork. With fellow Irish investors, he has been buying up plots on Cape Verde since he fell in love with the place three years ago. "We have had a phenomenal growth rate, selling more than 1,400 units, with 20 per cent going to British buyers," he says.

Then there are the locals, with established Cape Verdean developers Tecnicil marketing the Vila Verde on Sal, a scheme of 1,300 units. Tecnicil is pioneering mortgages for foreigners in a link-up with a Portuguese bank at rates of around six per cent.

"So far, 1,000 British buyers have put down deposits there," says Louise James, of The Overseas Property Association (www.topa.co.uk). "I would estimate 2,000 Britons are in the process of buying on Cape Verde".

This is a high estimate, according to former Financial Times journalist James Ensor, who bought a resale villa on Sal at Murdeira and runs the expat website Cape Verde Info.
"I would put it at around 400, although I have no idea of internet sales," he says. "It's extremely hard to get reliable figures as developers always like to pretend their schemes have almost sold out".

With Sal virtually a construction site, Ensor is convinced the house he bought two years ago for £80,000 is now worth well over £100,000.

There is no reason to disbelieve him that Cape Verde is in the grip of a property boom, but there is only one way of finding out.

Source: Mail On Sunday

This article has been brought to you be Sambala; the developer for Cape Verde Property.

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