The islands were uninhabited when Portuguese settlers landed in 1462, so Cabo Verdean religion was born creole, forged between the chapels of the colonists and the beliefs of the West Africans they enslaved and transported through the islands' markets. Ribeira Grande, now Cidade Velha and a World Heritage site, received one of the earliest colonial churches in the tropics and, from 1533, the first diocese of West Africa, from which priests and the enslaved alike carried a creolised Catholicism along the coast.
Centuries of drought, famine and emigration made the church the islands' most constant institution, its saints' festivals, called festas, the calendar of every island, and its brotherhoods the keepers of processions that blend Portuguese liturgy with African drumming, most visibly in the tabanka societies of Santiago that parade with drums, banners and conch shells in Carnival season and on saints' days. The hinterland of Santiago also produced the rabelados, the rebels, communities that from the 1940s refused reforms brought by newly arrived Holy Ghost priests and withdrew into their own worship, a dissent since softened into a celebrated cultural identity. Independence in 1975 under a briefly Marxist party changed the state but barely touched the parish, and today Nazarene and Adventist churches planted by emigrants returning from New England add a Protestant thread to an enduringly Catholic weave.