Espargos in the middle of the island was founded in the mid 20th century, it was founded in the late 1940s as an airport town, the last in the Portuguese era, in 1950, a number of flights rose, first Alitalia, then the Portuguese-Brazilian Friendship flight and South Africa Airways (SAA) in 1967 with the flights in London, the airline had to use the airport due to the international boycott of apartheid at the time. The last eruption in the colonial era was at Pico do Fogo in 1951 and was a small one.