This is the island of Boa Vista, which, if translated literally, means beautiful view. It is the most unspoilt beach resort with winter sun this close to home — a six-hour flight — with long powdery windswept beaches where you long to be stranded. Dotted around this remote island are small communities where women carry pots on their heads along streets of brightly painted Portuguese houses. Much of the island is barren, save for skinny goats grazing and the odd donkey. But this is a landscape on the brink of change.

Italians have started colonising the island. Breeze-block pizzerias, gelaterias, bars playing Grease hits, the odd hotel. And from November, a charter flight will travel six hours from Gatwick to the neighbouring island, Sal, opening this African paradise to Britons.

Cape Verde, a former Portuguese colony, is two hours south of the Canaries, just off the coast of Senegal in West Africa. Tourism here is in its infancy and is being compared to the Canaries in the 1960s. Little developed, it’s relatively close to Europe, with a year-round temperature of 21-31C (70-81F) and, once you get there, cheap. Oh, and you don’t have to take malaria tablets.

Boa Vista was my favourite of the three islands I visited and is just a 25-minute flight from Sal island. There are no chain hotels. Yet. There are not many tarred roads. Yet. There is no international airport. But a big terminal is being built. The current short runway takes only small aircraft and doesn’t have lights. During night-time emergencies, locals line up vehicles along the runway, headlights switched on, so that medical planes can land and take off.

Boa Vista has a population of about 3,500. With plans for hotels totalling 20,000 beds, this won’t be a barren landscape for long. Italian estate agents are popping up all over the island, and crude apartment blocks that haven’t involved an architect are shooting up in the dust.

The place to stay is Hotel Parque das Dunas, a complex of bungalows on a nine-mile (15km) beach. You can walk for hours, finding the odd crab. Or hire a four-wheel-drive vehicle to take you down miles of bumpy dirt roads to Santa Monica in the south, where there are more than 12 miles of pristine beach. On the west of the island is one of the biggest turtle breeding grounds in the world.

Until Boa Vista is ready for international flights, possibly later this year, the neighbouring island Sal, with direct flights from Gatwick from November 2, will be an easier option. Most hotels are in Santa Maria, a two-street town that is currently the centre of Cape Verdean tourism.

Here is a long white strip of a beach with calm waters, a few modest hotels, some Italian estate agents and the whirring of cement mixers as holiday apartment blocks spiral behind.

Two recommendations here. The Morabeza is a hotel with beach-view bungalows, established in the 1960s by a Belgian couple whose daughter, Sophie Marcellesi, runs it now. The other is the Hotel Odjo d’Agua, which has probably the best restaurant in town. It has a huge panoramic terrace hanging over the sea with the sound of waves crashing against the rocks below.

It was here that I braved sea fingers — perceves — and cracas. Sea fingers: purply brown fingers with a huge knuckle on the end that you crack off. Then peel off a bandage-like skin to reveal a sliver of slime that you dunk in chilli sauce. And if you haven’t gagged by then, swallow. Cracas, on the other hand, consists of a pile of holey rocks covered with moss. Get a knitting needle, poke inside, fish out slime, and dunk in chilli.

Slime with chillis. Urgh! Possibly the most disgusting thing I’ve ever tasted.

And there is more to the culinary downside of paradise. Yes, the lobster is wonderful and there’s no end to the variety of grilled or fried fish (grouper is everywhere and tuna is a huge industry). But vegetables and fruit are scarce on some islands. Most of the papaya, bananas, tomatoes and peppers, if you can find any, are flown in from Brazil.

The final leg of my journey took me to Santiago island. Here, in contrast, there are plenty of fruit and vegetables for the inhabitants. This is a volcanic island with lush palm trees. In the markets women sell small, sweet mangoes and baby bananas, bunches of fresh herbs and peppers out of buckets.

I stayed in a small village in the mountains, at Quinta da Montanha, run by Lindorfo Marques Ortet. He resettled here three years ago after living in Bulgaria and Belgium. His ten-room orange hotel with PVC windows hangs precariously on a hillside. The two big draws here are Lindorfo’s acacia wood-burning oven and a star-gazing telescope. “I come back — like a turtle,” he says. “A turtle always returns to the place it is born.”

I woke in the morning to a view of mountains cloaked in mist. Cocks were crowing, goats bleating, and guitar-based Cape Verdean music played on the radio with the voices of local heroes such as Cesaria Evoria, Lura and Vadu.

On my last day I visited Cidade Velha, in Santiago. It’s a beach community established by the Portuguese in the 16th century. It has a black volcanic stone beach, a few modest houses, an abandoned convent and a ruined fort to keep out pirates, including Sir Francis Drake.

A church dating from 1495 has just one prominent tombstone in the foreground. What was so special about this person, I asked my guide. “He was a very kind Catholic priest and is rumoured to have fathered 40 children in the village.”

Near by, the village elders were sitting on the steps surrounding the old slave whipping-post. Boys played table football, the table legs rattling violently on the cobblestones. The women were laying out the washing on the streets to dry and laughing children bobbed up and down seal-like in the sea. One wonders, wistfully, how tourism may change all this.