Until earlier this month they remained unspoiled by the worst of western degeneracy. That is, until a shocking double murder shook the 'New Canaries' of its innocence.

Peter Popham reports

THEY held a vigil for the dead women: nearly 1,000 people, dressed in white shirts for purity, islanders and visitors alike, all holding candles, walking in silent procession through the main street of the little town of Santa Maria in the far south of the island of Sal. From the shore came the sound of drumming. Snatches of 'zouk love', the local dance music, blew in from the homes and little cafes of the town. But the marchers were solemn, silent.

"There are nearly a thousand of us here tonight, " one of the organisers, Ninha Fortes, told a local radio station. "Our aim is to pay homage to the victims and give proof of our solidarity to their families, who have been most touched by our gesture."

The whole archipelago of Cape Verde has been stunned by the events of Thursday 8 February . . . the murders that occurred just inland from a beach on the west of Sal. Things like this don't happen here, they say. Nothing like this has ever happened here.

And the Cape Verdeans are particularly unhappy because the dead women were well known on the island: it was like a murder in the family. "These deaths have shocked all of us with their cruelty, " said a note of condolence sent by Cape Verdeans living in Italy to the victims' parents. "These girls were the ideal tourists and guests, the sort every nation would desire, because they loved our islands and showed it by coming there often."

On that fateful Thursday evening earlier this month, Giorgia Busato, 28, and her friends Dalia Saiani, 33, a junior windsurfing champion, and Agnese, who was about to celebrate her 18th birthday, had a dinner date. It was probably not something they were looking forward to; it was rather in the nature of something that had to be got over with.

Dalia had fallen in love with Cape Verde.

A windsurfing fanatic for years, a junior champion at 13, she had discovered the islands' powerful, hollow waves and, like hundreds of young Italians, had succeeded in building a life around long, idyllic winter holidays centred on Sal's broad white beaches and perfectly clean sea. She had bought a little house by the shore, and struck up a friendship with Giorgia, a travel agent likewise besotted with the archipelago, who had also bought a small home.

All three had recently arrived from Italy. Dalia had brought her young friend Agnese from Ravenna . . . the teenager's first holiday away from her parents, while her school friends were off skiing . . . to introduce her to this blissful world.

But the appointment with Sandro Rosario was not expected to be blissful: it was, in Dalia's view, the only way of getting this tiresome 21-year-old Cape Verdean tour guide, the guy with the white streak in his hair, out of her life.

Dalia and Rosario had had some kind of relationship. To her friends she dismissed it as a brief flirtation. For him, however, it was something far more important. He wouldn't leave her alone. He rang her incessantly demanding dates; he lay in wait for her. But Dalia acquired a new boyfriend . . . a windsurfing nut originally from Cape Verde but living in Brazil, who was arriving for the first world windsurfing championships to be held in the islands.

Rosario found out about his arrival.

Everyone on the 22-mile-by-seven-mile island knows everybody else . . . it's impossible to keep a secret. Rosario became more importunate than ever, demanding a dinner date. Dalia finally agreed on condition that she bring her two friends.

Rosario picked them up from their home in a borrowed car and drove them towards the house he shared with his parents in Espargos, in the west of the island. He had a friend with him in the car.

On the way he veered off in the direction of the village of Palmeiras, saying he had to drop off his friend. But before reaching the village he changed direction again, hurling the car down the sandy track that leads to the oasis of Fontona.

The girls in the back grew worried and demanded to know where they were going.

Rosario slammed on the brakes and doused them in pepper spray from an aerosol.

The two men then dragged Dalia and Giorgia from the car and on to the sand dunes. Agnese was ordered to stay where she was. From the car she watched helplessly as her friends were raped. "I saw what they did, " she said. "I heard their cries. Then I couldn't take any more. I closed my eyes and lay down on the back seat. I was paralysed with fear.

"When they had finished with them, Sandro came back, started the car and we drove off. He made me get out in a wood and beat me on the head with a rock. I passed out and when I came to he wasn't there any more." After a night of terror and a desperate hike along the beach in the morning, she finally succeeded in flagging down a taxi and getting to Santa Maria and safety. Police in Santa Maria, utterly unfamiliar with murder inquiries, were polite but sceptical when she told them her story.

"Okay, we will look, " they responded vaguely. But friends among the island's burgeoning tourist community took her at her word, then drove to Fontona and soon located the bodies, buried in shallow graves in the sand. A police pathologist discovered sand in Dalia's lungs: she had been buried alive. Life on these islands was always fragile. Aridity and fierce and constant winds mean that desertification is an ever-present menace, which is made worse by deforestation as the inhabitants plunder the shrinking forests for fuel.

Now, thanks to the tourist industry, the world is again beating a path to Cape Verde's stormy door. The Italians have been a big presence here for years, especially on the flat, arid Sal, where the water sports industry has its greatest concentration and which many of the tourists to Cape Verde never leave.

Santa Maria, the town through which the mourners processed this week, is by day the scene of frenetic building activity as developers capitalise on the islands' new airports, new fame and soaring land prices. An American mogul is planning a golf course, a bizarre idea in a place threatened with becoming a desert. The Chinese promise a cement factory.

The modern nightmare has arrived: the horrible murder of two surf-mad Italians may be yet another evil augury. But there is still music and a vital Creole culture out there for those ready to break away from the beaten path, still fresh fish and cachupa (corn stew) to guzzle as the day breaks at the end of a long night of carousing, while the waves crash down.