Travel in time to the days when Sao Tomé was a slave station on the route to Brazil.
Take the time to pay a visit to plantations and their beautifull owners houses dating back to the colonial epoch. Some are now run as hotels where you can spend a night and others are now abandoned reverting to interesting secondary forest growth.
Sundy
Sundi was once the home of the Portuguese royal family. Only by visiting this roça can you come to understand how self-sufficient such colonial farms once were. Sundi boasts a very large hospital, a church, a very big workshop, some stables, coffee- and cocoa-roasting facilities, an enormous mansion, the sleeping quarters for hundreds of labourers, a railway network with steam locomotive and various other outbuildings.
It is in the north of the Island that we can find the most famous plantation of Príncipe. And it is understood the reason of that big famous besides the usual compartments of the important plantations (the house of the administrator, the houses of the workers, the hospital, a church, the warehouses, the houses of the foremen), the Sundy restored the majority of the spaces. The main house, particularly, is an isolated case, because it is in the same state it was left by its last Portuguese owner: the paintings, the furniture and faience are the same of the other times, happening the same with the wood ceilings and the floor in wall-tiles, the leaving room, the dining room, the marquise, the bedrooms and the veranda of the second floor, with privileged eyesight to the sea. And everything was duly repaired. It is by that reason that when the president of the Republic of São Tomé visits the Island he chooses it as the official residence.
But it is outside of the house that there is the most surprising element: the stable compartments that remind a stone castle with towers and crenels.
The horses, in that era, were a possession very much appreciated.
Belo Monte
The northeast edge is the largest treasures of Príncipe. It is not only because of the plantation Belo Monte, a beautiful example that makes the difference by its marvellous localization in the heights, from which we have a rare landscape but it is above all what is in its foothill: the Banana Beach the most beautiful of São Tomé-e-Príncipe.