IT WAS just after midnight when Leonel Almeida got up to sing, accompanying himself on the reco-reco, a traditional wooden scraper. He sang of saudade, that bittersweet nostalgia for a distant homeland that he had left far behind.

Yet this was not fado, the melancholy Lisbon blues, but morna, its African equivalent, with lyrics in Portuguese Creole - and the country he was singing about was Cape Verde.

Thanks to the success of West African artists on the world music circuit, growing numbers of visitors are heading to Mali, Senegal and Cape Verde in search of authentic African sounds. But you don't have to go that far to listen to African music. A long weekend in the Portuguese capital will do.

Stand on the waterfront at Belém on a blustery Atlantic morning and you can feel the pull of the ocean. A marble map of the world, laid out on the ground, shows the routes taken by the caravels and the conquests of the country's 15th-century explorers - Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Angola, Mozambique, Brazil - as Portugal established the greatest maritime empire on earth.

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In the past 30 years, the tide has turned as immigrants from Portugal's former colonies have settled in Lisbon. Musicians such as Waldemar Bastos from Angola and Manecas Costa from Guinea-Bissau have made the city their home --and together with second-generation Cape Verdeans such as Lura and Sara Tavares, created a thriving African music scene.

To catch live African music, head for Casa da Morna, owned by the Cape Verdean singer and guitarist Tito Paris. Hidden away in the Alcântara district beneath a massive suspension bridge over the Tagus estuary, at first glance it looks like just another trendy, minimalist restaurant, with a menu featuring moamba (Angolan chicken and okra casserole) and cachupa (a Cape Verdean stew of cabbage, meat and beans).

But after dinner this place comes alive, as Tito and friends turn it into a club for Cape Verdean and Angolan musicians. Leonel Almeida is a regular, but you never know who else is going to turn up.

On the night I was there, the Cape Verdean diva Celina Pereira was persuaded to sing a couple of mornas, and the veteran Angolan singer Bonga croaked his way through a few verses of Sodade, the lament made famous by Cesaria Evora.

Just around the corner, near the Angolan consulate, the Luanda nightclub throbs with young Africans dancing to kuduro music at weekends. The sound emerged on the streets of Angola in the 1980s and reached Lisbon a decade later, where it was taken up by the techno crowd.

Back in the centre of town, Espaço Cabo Verde is run by Nelson Rendall, a guitarist and son of the Cape Verdean composer Luís Rendall. I climbed the steps and rang the bell to be let into what appeared to be a cross between a restaurant, a private house and an African social club.

Nelson's daughter Sara brought me a glass of muscat and directed me to the self-service buffet, with its steaming trays of cachupa, rice and manioc porridge. Before long, Rendall was on stage, accompanied by the singer and guitarist Zezé Barbosa.

Later I took a taxi to Enclave, a club founded in the 1970s. At two in the morning, the band was just warming up, but an hour later the dance floor was full with everyone from African teenagers to middle-aged Portuguese couples. Since the closure last year of B.Leza, a dance hall in a dilapidated 16th-century mansion, this is one of the few places in Lisbon to hear live African music late at night.

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