For many travellers, Praia Piscina is the most beautiful beach in São Tomé, and its name says it all: when the tide goes out, the volcanic rocks framing the golden sand enclose natural pools of clear, mild water, perfect for floating in as if you were in a swimming pool overlooking the Atlantic. It sits at the southern tip of the island, in the wildest, most remote and least populated area, near the little village of Porto Alegre.
Getting there is part of the experience: you follow the southern road as it winds through cocoa plantations, fishing villages and lush rainforest, then tackle a final stretch of dirt track that tests any vehicle. The reward is a beach that is almost always deserted, with coconut palms leaning over the sand, calm water for swimming and snorkelling, and that equatorial silence broken only by the waves and the birds.
This guide explains how to get to Praia Piscina, what to expect (an unspoilt beach with no facilities), how to combine it with other southern gems such as Praia Jalé and Ilhéu das Rolas, and how to get around the most isolated part of a country that is already one of the least visited and best preserved destinations in Africa. It is a paradise for anyone looking for pure nature, with no crowds and no infrastructure.
Praia Piscina and the whole south of São Tomé are part of an island that was completely untouched and uninhabited when Portuguese navigators sighted it around 1470. Turned into a sugar colony and later into the world's largest cocoa producer thanks to forced labour on the 'roças', São Tomé was for centuries an engine of the Atlantic slave economy. The south, with its sandy beaches and impenetrable forest, always remained the most remote and least populated part of the island, and it keeps that wild character today. The full story — from discovery to independence in 1975 — is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Latitude zero: an islet crossed by the equator, with its 1936 monument and natural pools of crystal-clear water among the rocks of southern São Tomé.
Read the history of The far south and the equator →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Unlike almost any other inhabited corner of Africa, the islands of São Tomé and Príncipe had no population at all when written history reached them: they were two volcanoes covered in equatorial rainforest rising out of the Gulf of Guinea, without a single human being. Portuguese navigators in the service of the Crown sighted them around 1470-1471 (according to tradition, São Tomé on Saint Thomas's Day and Príncipe shortly afterwards), in the middle of the Age of Discovery, when Portugal was methodically exploring the African coast in search of a route to the Indies.
The southern tip of São Tomé island, where Praia Piscina is today, was then the most remote and wild part of an already isolated territory, and it stayed that way for centuries. Impenetrable jungle, torrential rain, rocky coasts and golden-sand beaches like this one made up an untouched landscape that the first settlers barely reached: colonisation was concentrated in the north, which was drier and more accessible, around the young town of São Tomé.
The position of the islands, almost on the equator and halfway between the African mainland and the Atlantic routes, would turn them into a key (and tragic) piece of the trade Portugal would build over the following centuries. But the deep south, with beaches like Praia Piscina, always stayed on the sidelines, a world apart of untouched nature.
Real settlement of São Tomé began around 1493, when the Portuguese Crown handed the island over to settlers and granted them the right to bring enslaved labour from the mainland. The equatorial climate proved ideal for sugar cane, and within a few decades São Tomé became one of the largest sugar producers in the Atlantic world, grown on large plantations worked by thousands of enslaved Africans brought from the coast of Guinea, the Congo and Angola.
That first sugar boom of the 16th century turned the small island into a sinister laboratory: it was one of the first places on the planet where the slave plantation model was tried out, a model later exported on a massive scale to Brazil and the Caribbean. Colonial society mixed Portuguese settlers with free and enslaved Africans, giving rise to the Creole population and to languages of its own such as Forro. There were also slave revolts and attacks by pirates and rival powers.
By the end of the 16th century, São Tomé's sugar went into decline, overtaken by cheaper and more plentiful Brazilian production. The plantations were abandoned or converted, the island lost importance and for a long time remained a stopover in the slave trade and a half-forgotten territory. The south, with beaches like Praia Piscina, stayed practically unpopulated, covered by jungle.
The second great economic cycle arrived in the 19th century and transformed the landscape once again: cocoa. Introduced to the islands at the beginning of that century, cocoa found ideal conditions in the volcanic soil and humid climate of São Tomé and Príncipe. The 'roças' were created: huge plantation-villages with a manor house, hospital, chapel, railway lines and rows of housing for the workers, true villages devoted entirely to producing cocoa and coffee.
At the beginning of the 20th century, São Tomé and Príncipe became the world's largest cocoa producer, and its chocolate supplied the big European factories. But that splendour was built on a brutal labour system: although slavery had been officially abolished in the Portuguese empire in 1869-1875, the roças imposed the regime of the 'serviçais', contract workers brought from Angola, Cape Verde and Mozambique in conditions so close to slavery that they caused an international scandal and even a boycott by British chocolate makers in the early 20th century.
The south of the island also filled up with roças that made use of the jungle and the coastal land, and the road that now leads to Praia Piscina passes several of those historic plantations, some still active and others half-abandoned and swallowed by vegetation. That landscape of ruined roças, wild cocoa and workers' villages is an essential part of the country's identity and of the journey to the far south.
The 20th century brought growing national and anti-colonial awareness. In 1953, the colonial repression of a protest led to the so-called Batepá Massacre, in which many São Toméans died and which became a symbol of national awakening. In the following decades the Movement for the Liberation of São Tomé and Príncipe (MLSTP) was formed, and after the Carnation Revolution in Portugal (1974), the country finally gained independence on 12 July 1975, with Manuel Pinto da Costa as its first president.
The young country went through years of one-party rule and an economy dependent on cocoa, and from 1990 it adopted multi-party democracy. With the roças in decline and a fragile economy, São Tomé and Príncipe began to look towards another treasure: its extraordinarily well-preserved nature. The isolation that had kept the south unpopulated for centuries meant that its forests, beaches and reefs reached the 21st century almost intact.
Today the far south, with Praia Piscina, Praia Jalé and Porto Alegre, is one of the country's most highly rated ecotourism destinations: unspoilt beaches, nesting sea turtles, primary rainforest and complete tranquillity. What was for centuries the most remote and difficult part of the island is now, precisely for that reason, one of its biggest attractions: a natural paradise where the history of sugar and cocoa lives alongside a natural world that tourism is trying to preserve.
