(AfriquesPlus) - In July, UNESCO inscribed six former colonial plantations in São Tomé and Príncipe — known locally as roças — on its World Heritage list, according to a feature published on 15 August 2026 by The Continent, written by João Moreira da Silva. The estates, Monte Café, Água Izé, Diogo Vaz, São João dos Angolares, Sundy and Belo Monte, once combined agricultural land, processing facilities, workers' housing, hospitals, schools and churches into self-contained colonial systems built on enslaved and later indentured labour, the publication reports.
Long before the plantation model was scaled up across the Americas, it was tested here. Portuguese explorers landed on the then-uninhabited islands in 1470 and quickly identified them as ideal terrain for sugarcane, according to The Continent. Lacking a local workforce willing to farm the crop, colonisers brought in enslaved Africans, creating what the magazine describes as one of the earliest Atlantic slave-plantation societies, a template later replicated at industrial scale in British, French and American colonies. Several revolts by the enslaved population were violently put down, the article notes.
The economic model evolved but the underlying coercion persisted. After Brazil's independence in 1822 pulled Portugal's attention back to São Tomé, planters pivoted to coffee and cocoa, consolidating land in the hands of a small planter class. Slavery's official abolition in 1865 did little to change conditions on the ground: tens of thousands of workers recruited from Angola, Mozambique and Cabo Verde were classified as contract labourers, but restrictions on their movement made the arrangement, in the magazine's words, "slavery in all but name." By the early twentieth century, allegations that this contract system amounted to disguised slavery triggered an international scandal, prompting British chocolate manufacturers to boycott the islands' cocoa in 1909, The Continent recalls.
Tourism as lifeline, and as risk
Today, the government of São Tomé and Príncipe — home to roughly 200,000 people grappling with chronic electricity shortages and rural poverty — has welcomed the UNESCO designation as a potential source of tourism revenue, investment and jobs, the article states. Chef and entrepreneur João Carlos Silva, who restored the roça São João dos Angolares his father acquired in the 1990s, told The Continent he sees the listing as a chance to reinvent these estates as spaces for reflecting on culture and local production, adding of his next project, roça Água Izé: "Reinventing Água Izé means transforming it into a genuine city."
But the same feature makes clear that heritage status does not resolve who controls that transformation. Five of the six newly listed roças are privately owned, and their owners, according to Santomean writer Ivanick Lopandza, are primarily driven by revenue from tourism, a dynamic he warns can lead owners to sanitise uncomfortable history. "The owners of roças often remove parts of their history, such as colonial violence, that might offend European tourists," Lopandza told the magazine, arguing the state must take a stronger role rather than leaving custodianship "in the hands of the few." Across the water in Príncipe, South African billionaire Mark Shuttleworth has acquired nearly half the island as part of an ecotourism venture that includes a full restoration of roça Sundy, one of the newly listed sites, the article notes.
Underlying the heritage debate is a demographic crisis the UNESCO listing alone cannot fix. Rising sea levels, flash floods and coastal erosion tied to the climate crisis have already displaced several communities, while young Santomeans continue to leave in search of work: by 2025, an estimated 46,000 citizens — about a fifth of the archipelago's population — were living in Portugal, according to The Continent. Historian and former diplomat Carlos Agostinho das Neves told the magazine that young people "would rather leave, even if it means facing difficult times somewhere else," warning that when a population loses faith in its institutions, "it becomes difficult to move forward."
The tension between conservation and lived poverty is one the article's sources return to repeatedly. Lopandza's closing warning, cited by The Continent, distills the dilemma facing the islands as they try to convert a brutal past into economic opportunity: "The roças are living spaces, with communities. Unesco recognition risks turning poverty into a museum."
