Why visit Monte Café
Roça is the Santomean word for a plantation estate, and Monte Café is one of the oldest and largest. Founded in 1858 in the hills above Trindade, it grew arabica coffee on slopes high enough to be cool and often wrapped in mist. Its drying yards, warehouses, hospital and rows of workers’ housing still stand, and several hundred people live among them.
Part of the estate now houses the Coffee Museum, where guides walk you through the old machinery and the process from cherry to cup, ending with a tasting. A growers’ cooperative has revived production, and Monte Café coffee is once again exported.
A visit here is also a history lesson. Each roça was a self-contained world with its own railway, chapel and hospital — and its own regime of control over the people who worked it.
The history, told honestly
The Portuguese settled these uninhabited islands in the late 15th century and worked them with enslaved Africans, first for sugar. Coffee arrived around 1800 and cocoa in the 1820s, and the roça system spread across almost all the farmable land. By the early 1900s São Tomé and Príncipe was the world’s biggest cocoa exporter.
Slavery was formally abolished in the 1870s, but it was replaced by a contract system that brought tens of thousands of serviçais from Angola, Cape Verde and Mozambique. Contracts were routinely renewed without consent and few workers ever went home; contemporaries called it slavery in all but name. Reports of these conditions led British chocolate makers, Cadbury among them, to boycott São Tomé cocoa in 1909.
Forced labour persisted for decades. In February 1953 colonial authorities and settlers killed hundreds of Santomeans in what is remembered as the Batepá massacre. After independence in 1975 the roças were nationalised, production collapsed, and many estates became the villages their workers’ descendants live in today.
How long to stay
Allow two hours at Monte Café itself, or half a day with the nearby waterfall. It combines naturally with Bom Sucesso and Obô National Park, a little further up the same road.
Monte Café & the Roças highlights
- A guided tour of the Coffee Museum
- Tasting estate-grown arabica where it is produced
- Walking the old drying yards and workers’ quarters
- Hearing the story of the serviçais from local guides
- Cool air and views over the north of the island
- Seeing cocoa pods on the tree in the surrounding farms
