Funco (Cabo Verde Round House)

The funco is the traditional rural house of Cabo Verde: a small circular building with stone walls and a conical thatched roof. It is found mainly on the islands of Fogo, Santiago and Maio, and is generally described as a house form of African origin, related to round houses on the West African mainland, including Guinea-Bissau.

Construction

Walls are built of local stone; on Fogo, builders in the crater settlement of Chã das Caldeiras used black bricks made from lava. The roof is a cone of palm fronds, or straw, laid over a timber frame. The steep cone sheds rain quickly from the thatch.

Social history

In colonial Cabo Verde, the funco was associated with poorer and mainly Black rural households, while the two-storey sobrado town houses, concentrated in places such as São Filipe on Fogo, belonged to wealthier, mainly white families. The ethnographer António Carreira (1965) recorded that the word itself meant a small, poor building. The novelist Henrique Teixeira de Sousa wrote about the funco in his studies of Fogo society.

Chã das Caldeiras

The village of Chã das Caldeiras, inside the Fogo volcano crater, kept a high proportion of round, single-storey thatched houses; huts made up about a quarter of the village. It was rebuilt after the 1995 eruption, largely destroyed in the 2014-15 eruption, and new lava-built huts were constructed from early 2016.

Today

The funco has largely given way to block-built houses; since independence in 1975 many new buildings in Cabo Verde have flat roofs. Examples survive in villages and in the Museu Municipal de São Filipe on Fogo. Two settlements in São Lourenço dos Órgãos on Santiago, Funco Bandeira and Funco Marques, take their names from the type, and the national architects' association named its discussion portal "Funco" in its honour.