Sand soars into the air, scooped aloft with harried fury. The stars, studded across the mauve sky, are the only source of light, barring, that is, a small, red torch placed at the edge of a hole in the sand, big enough to occasion a hospital visit should anyone stumble into it. Sonorous ocean waves lap behind me as I lie on my stomach, semi-submerged in the vanilla-toffee-coloured sands, watching a loggerhead turtle continue to use her back flippers to fling sand over the 73 glistening white eggs she’s laid over the past 40 minutes. The turtle is continuing an act that has occurred for hundreds of millions of years on the coastline of Sal, Cape Verde. 

Some 350 miles off the west coast of Africa, Sal, which boasts around the same number of days of sunshine each year (over 360), is experiencing a turtle boom. “There were only around 15,000 nestings here [each year] a decade ago,” says Jordi Lopez, my guide and local marine biologist. “Now we have around 200,000. It’s good news – but, unfortunately, there is also some bad news.”

Before Lopez can continue, we are both awed into silence by the movement of the turtle. Having finished burying her eggs, she walks with an almost haughty, regal determination and steadiness across the sands, making her way back towards the ocean from which she emerged to lay her eggs barely an hour before.

To witness a turtle’s nocturnal emergence from the ocean is to experience one of nature’s most intimate moments. Incredibly, as I later learn, the female babies who survive into adulthood – only around one in a thousand will make it that far – have the knack, despite their vast oceanic wanderings, to return to the same beach where they were born in order to give birth themselves. It’s an astonishing feat of maternal geographical memory retention for any animal, reptile or otherwise. Turtle recall, if you will. 

Across the sands, in the far distance, is the cluster of lights that partially illuminates Santa Maria; a town of cobbled lanes, pastel cottages and indolent, sleeping dogs that is undergoing a partial transformation. Up until the early 1990s, tourism was an all but unknown concept on Cape Verde. Independent from Portuguese colonial rule since 1975 – as with all other African Lusophone nations – Cape Verde avoided the immediate commencement of civil war that all but destroyed Angola and Mozambique over the coming decades. The country’s economy, dependent on salt exports and fishing, rendered it a backwater until, in the late 1980s, the first hotels were built on Sal, one of the driest and sunniest of the nine inhabited Cape Verde islands.  

Though Sal’s interior is a mostly featureless expanse of salt pans and scrub, much of the island is ringed by pristine white-sand beaches. Inevitably, this has led to a small but growing number of modern mega-resorts scattered around the island’s coastline. To witness the turtle’s pilgrimage, and for a more genuine taste of Cape Verde, I checked into one of Sal’s original hotels – Odjo de Agua.

The hotel has been run since its inception by the Lobo family, known locally for their musical talents. The collection of instruments that are housed in a glass case at the hotel’s entrance, alongside antique irons, telephones and typewriters, announce the fact you’re far from chain-hotel tedium.

There are sleeping cats on the reception floor, old wooden bannisters polished to within an inch of their lives, cactuses the size and shape of basketballs in the gardens, flame trees overhanging the swimming pool and, for reasons I never quite got to the bottom of, an excellently-drawn stencil of Bryan Cranston in Breaking Bad on an easel near the breakfast bar.

Odjo de Agua

Above the restaurant’s rondavel-shaped thatched-roof restaurant is a miniature, tubular lighthouse that warns off passing ships. It was in the restaurant below that I got my first taste of the Verdean national dish – cachupa. Considered perfectly acceptable at any time of the day or night, cachupa starts the previous day as corn and beans in cold water, before cassava (yuca), chorizo sausage, green vegetables and sweet potatoes are added a day later. I ate my first one at eight in the morning. It reminded me of corned beef hash from my northern English childhood, fused with the kind of black-eyed pea stew you might find in the Caribbean or Virginia. 

My room at Odjo de Agua was a white-tile-and-marble affair with raffish red-and-white striped duvets and curtains, reminiscent of a British seaside deckchair, and a balcony overlooking the ocean where local children took it in turns to dive off the tiny, creaking jetty and the occasional tourist ventured into the waves clutching a surfboard.

Here, in the centre of Santa Maria, the scale and pace of life are small and slow. To the west of the town centre lies the beginnings of Canary Island-esque tourism in the form of a slick boulevard and touts brandishing menus urging you to enter their bar for happy hour.

Happily, it’s effortless to simply walk in the other direction, through the Old Town of Santa Maria where shack bars serve chilled bottles of the local Strela beer for €1 and where little restaurants, such as the Art Kafe, are full of more discerning visitors from Portugal digging into plates of freshly-caught wahoo and grouper. 

It’s to the east of Santa Maria, even further away from the sprawl of new resort developments, that I find myself with Lopez and the pregnant turtle. “As I was saying, there is also some not so positive news for the turtles.” Lopez continues: “The issue is that all the eggs are being born as girls. It’s global warming. It makes the sand warmer and this affects the gender of the baby turtle.” Eggs that incubate in sand below 81.86°F, Lopez explains, produce males. Temperatures higher than 87.8°F result in the eggs hatching with females. 

The rising temperatures in Cape Verde, the result of climate change, mean that, by some estimates, by the end of this century 100 per cent of the eggs laid on the islands will be female. Up to 84 per cent of youngsters are already born female, according to research conducted by the University of Exeter. “I’d be pretty certain that all the eggs this turtle has just laid will be born girls,” says Lopez, as the loggerhead vanishes into the ocean, letting the tide sweep her out into the bruise-coloured waters.

It’s a conundrum that, despite the wildly successful conservation efforts in Cape Verde over the past decade, could spell the end for loggerhead turtles in just 70 years’ time. Just like Cape Verde’s other islands, Sal is at a crossroads. And while visitor numbers look certain to rise, the long-term future for the loggerhead turtles that clamber ashore here is far more unclear. For now, at least, Sal remains a destination rich in these mesmerising reptiles and thankfully still light on the tawdrier elements of mass tourism.  

Tui offers a seven night holiday to Sal, Cape Verde on a B&B basis. Prices from £750 per person. Turtle nesting beach tours from £31 per person, visit tui.co.uk

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