The people and the vision behind Casa Pé di Polon holiday home
Jairzinho & Lore
We are a couple with two kids living in Belgium. Jairzinho was, however, born and raised in Picos, Santiago Island, Cape Verde, where our holiday home Casa Pé di Polon is located. So we can help you with all the tips and tricks to organize your holidays in Santiago. We both work in Belgium, Jairzinho as a researcher at a university and Lore as a teacher. Our holidays we try to spend as much as possible on Santiago Island. Therefore we started dreaming of our own house in Cape Verde. A couple of years ago we fell in love with this place and the valley of Leitãozinho. Since we concluded the renovation of the house in 2019, this became our home in Cape Verde. In order to give other people the chance to discover the real Cape Verde, far away from mass tourism, we decided to put our house for rent as a vacation rental whenever we are not around.
Sustainable tourism
From the start we tried to ensure that our project would have a positive impact on the local community and environment.
We started by keeping the original format of the house, not to disturb the peculiarity of the village and the landscape of the surrounding valley. In renovating the house we only worked with local workmen. All our furniture was made by the local carpenter, the doors and windows by the local metalworker and the irrigation system of our garden was installed by a local technician. The maintenance of our holiday home is in the hands of our neighbour, Lina. She also offers to cook traditional meals served at our house for a fair price. We try to work together with local drivers and recommend local supermarkets and restaurants to our guests to stimulate the regional economy.
What we enjoy the most in Cape Verde is it's beautiful nature and therefore we try to cherish it as much as possible. Under the terrace in front of the house we build a water reservoir that can contain up to 37 tons of water. In that way we can capture as much water as possible during the raining season to irrigate our garden and provide running water for the house. In the garden we planted a large number of tropical trees to help to keep the soil from washing away by heavy rain, improving the soil fertility and providing protection from sun and wind. We chose to plant fruit trees like banana, papaya and mango which in future will also provide our guests with fresh biological fruits. Besides the trees we installed a drip irrigation system to be able to grow biological vegetables in our own garden with an optimal use of water. We also hope to inspire the local community with our garden to think beyond the traditional corn and beans and be more self-sustaining.
Schooling project
This year we are spending a full 6 months in our holiday home in Cape Verde for Jairzinho's research at the National Archive. In these months our two boys are attending the primary school of Leitãozinho, quite an experience! With our boys attending the school, we started to see the many needs of the school children in the area. A big portion of our boys' colleagues didn't have the necessary school books and materials, not even weeks after starting the school year. When you know that the minimal net income in Cape Verde is 13000 CVE (+/- €130) and that a large portion of the population lives from small agriculture not having a stable revenue, it is not so difficult to understand that many families have financial struggles. Count on top of that a widespread problem of alcohol abuse and one parent families and you start to see the bigger picture. Because of our strong believe that a good education is essential for the children's and the country's future, we gathered money from friends and families to provide every child with the necessary materials. We have decided that after our 6 months stay in Cape Verde we will save 20% of our incomes from Casa Pé di Polon to help those students who can not buy school material at the beginning of every school year.
