Cabo Verde (formerly Cape Verde) uses Cape Verde Time (CVT), UTC-1, year-round. No daylight saving. IANA identifier: Atlantic/Cape_Verde. The archipelago of ten volcanic islands, strung across 600 kilometers of the Atlantic Ocean some 570 kilometers off the coast of Senegal, uses the only negative UTC offset of any African country.
This places Cabo Verde in the same timezone as the Azores, a Portuguese archipelago also in the Atlantic. Both island groups share their longitude range and their clock.
The mid-Atlantic crossroads
Cabo Verde was uninhabited when Portuguese sailors arrived in 1456, making it one of the few territories in the world that has no pre-colonial indigenous population. The Portuguese settled it as a mid-Atlantic way station, and for centuries the islands played a critical role in the Atlantic slave trade, serving as a transfer point for enslaved Africans being shipped to the Americas.
The islands also became important for whaling in the 18th and 19th centuries. American whalers, particularly from New Bedford and Nantucket, recruited heavily from the Cabo Verdean population. Communities of Cabo Verdean descent formed in New Bedford and other New England ports, maintaining cultural connections across the Atlantic.
The IANA identifier Atlantic/Cape_Verde captures this Atlantic positioning precisely. The islands are an Atlantic entity, culturally and geographically, despite their administrative connection to Africa.
Morna and the time of longing
Cabo Verde’s national music is morna, a melancholic vocal style associated with the concept of saudade (a Portuguese word for a deep, nostalgic longing for something absent). The greatest morna singer was Cesária Évora (1941-2011), who performed barefoot as a trademark and became internationally famous in the 1990s.
Saudade is, at its core, about time: the absence of something that was once present, the distance between past belonging and present reality. Cabo Verde’s history of emigration (more Cabo Verdeans live abroad than in the islands) makes saudade not a stylistic choice but a lived condition. You miss the island from New Bedford. You miss New Bedford from the island. The longing is bidirectional and permanent.
UTC-1 is one hour behind Greenwich, one hour behind the coast of the African continent it belongs to administratively. The islands sit behind, a little, in time as in geography.
Independence and the renamed country
Cabo Verde gained independence from Portugal in 1975, as part of the same independence wave that ended Portuguese colonial rule across Africa. The country was spelled “Cape Verde” in English for decades; the government requested that international organizations adopt “Cabo Verde,” the Portuguese name, in 2013, and the UN recognized the change.
This is a small act of linguistic reclamation: insisting that the country be named in its own language rather than English or French. UTC-1 was retained from the colonial period.
