Investing in AfricaInterest in property in Cape Verde is getting a boost from today, with the start of scheduled weekly flights from Gatwick and Manchester to Sal, the island where Cape Verde's international airport is located.
Charter line Astraeus will make the five-and-a-half-hour flight every Thursday.
Sambala, a company which earlier this year launched a major development on Santiago, an island a half-hour plane hop from Sal, is expecting the flights will renew customer interest.
It is now selling two and three-bedroom townhouses in the second phase of the development, Vivendas de Santiago. They cost from €165,000 to €199,000.
The company also has a small number of villas for sale. Its first phase of 450 apartments and townhouses sold out after being launched earlier this year.
Plans for the development can be viewed at this weekend's Househunters in the Sun property exhibition in the RDS.
In another development just being launched in Santiago, this time through agents Savills/HOK, apartments, villas and townhouses in a five-star "resort community" called Ponta Bicuda will cost from €75,000 to €1.64 million.
The development, being sold from plans, will comprise six different "villages" on a 170-acre peninsula with 2.2 miles of coastline.
Buyers will be able to purchase apartments and townhouses either on a sale and leaseback basis, with an option to use them for four weeks a year, or outright. Villas on private plots away from the resort hotel are also available.
Facilities at the resort, which will include shops, restaurants, cafés, tennis courts, and watersports facilities will be available to all.
Santiago is one of Cape Verde's nine islands, which have very different landscapes, even culture, but all enjoy a Caribbean-type of atmosphere and fairly constant temperatures of 25 to 30 degrees.
In contrast to Sal, where the main airport is located because the island is flat, Santiago is green and hilly.
Despite its remoteness - Cape Verde is 300 miles west of Senegal in Africa, and just three and a half hours' flying time to northern Brazil - the country is being billed as the new travel/holiday home hotspot, the new Canaries in Ireland and
England, a position confirmed by the new direct flights.
www.sambaladevelopments.com
www.hok.ie/www.savills.com
