The most densely forest in Congo has been my home for many years, there I learned that without balance and harmony there can be no good quality of life. Spontaneously nature tends to balance, but man is able to hurt it deeply.
Today more than ever it is vital to defend and respect it.
Claudio Corallo
São Tomé and Príncipe: two independent islands since 1975 in the Atlantic Ocean off the Gulf of Guinea, discovered on December 21, 1471 by João de Santarem and Pêro Escobar, two Portuguese explorers.
In the novel Equator, set in São Tomé in the early 1900s, Miguel Sousa Tavares describes perfectly the essence of these places:
“The islands are beautiful, the beaches wonderful, and the forest is an extraordinary experience. Down here there is no world, at least the world we know in Europe, or in civilized countries. But there is the purity of a primitive world, in a brute state”.
The “world we know in Europe”, the globalized world, has now arrived, but the “primitive world”, both natural and social, has not disappeared. The shacks are without water, electricity and gas, there is no sewerage system: daily life spends all day outside the house, at work or on the street; the clothes are washed in the humus and dried on the stones of the shore. This is the place where the best chocolate in the world is produced, thanks also to the work of Claudio Corallo, from orentino, who has always been involved in agriculture between Africa and South America, and who settled in São Tomé for the high quality of his beans and seeds. Over the years he has revived two large plantations: Nova Moca, on the mother island, and Terreiro Velho, in Príncipe.