Unlike almost any other corner of the world, the islands of Cape Verde had no human history when they entered European history. Lying some 600 kilometres off the coast of Senegal, in the open Atlantic, they remained uninhabited until the mid-15th century. Some scholars do not entirely rule out occasional visits by Africans from the mainland, but there is no evidence of earlier settlement: in practice, these were untouched islands.
The discovery was part of the great Atlantic expansion driven by Prince Henry the Navigator. Between 1460 and 1462, navigators serving the Portuguese crown sighted and charted the archipelago. They included the Genoese António da Noli and the Portuguese Diogo Gomes for the eastern islands, and Diogo Afonso for the western ones. The name "Cabo Verde" does not come from the islands, which are mostly arid, but from the mainland Cape Verde, the westernmost point of Africa, which they face.
In 1462, Portuguese settlers landed on Santiago, the largest island, and founded Ribeira Grande, the first permanent European settlement in the tropics. The crown divided the land into captaincies and drew settlers with trading privileges. But for dry, empty islands to pay their way, they needed labour and a business: both would come from the African mainland, and both would shape the archipelago's fate for ever.
Cape Verde's economic fate was sealed in 1466, when King Afonso V granted the settlers of Santiago the right to trade on the Guinea coast, including in slaves. Thanks to its position halfway between Africa, Europe and, later, the Americas, Ribeira Grande became an entrepôt: a great depot where slave ships called. There, thousands of Africans captured in Senegambia and Guinea were held, "baptised", branded and resold before being shipped to Brazil and the Caribbean.
For more than a century, Ribeira Grande was one of the most important slave ports in the Atlantic and the richest city in the region. Its prosperity was built on that human trade: merchants, officials and clergy grew rich while cargoes of human beings passed over its docks. The city still bears symbols that sum up that era without euphemism. There is the pelourinho, the marble pillar where slaves were punished and put on display, erected in the early 16th century. There is the church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário, from 1495, considered the oldest surviving colonial church. And there is the imposing Fortaleza Real de São Filipe, completed in 1593 to defend the port against pirates.
Ribeira Grande was the first European colonial city in the tropics and the capital of the archipelago for 250 years. For its exceptional role in the first encounters between continents and in the birth of Atlantic trade, UNESCO declared it a World Heritage Site in 2009 under its current name: Cidade Velha, the Old City. It is a memory in stone of the glory and the horror from which Cape Verde was born.
Out of the forced coexistence of Portuguese settlers and enslaved Africans, something unprecedented emerged in Cape Verde: the world's first Creole society. On islands with no previous population, where nobody was "from here", biological and cultural mixing was inevitable and widespread. Portuguese from different regions, Jewish converts, traders and, above all, Africans from many peoples (Wolof, Mandinka, Felupe, Balanta, Temne) mixed and produced a new population that was neither European nor African, but Cape Verdean.
Its most lasting creation was the language. To understand one another on the plantations and in the slave quarters, Africans who spoke very different languages and their Portuguese masters forged a Portuguese-based Creole. This is Kriolu, or Cape Verdean Creole, considered one of the oldest Creoles still spoken. Born as a language of necessity, it became the mother tongue of an entire people: the language of home, of love and of song. Portuguese remained the official and administrative language.
On the island of Santiago, the most African of the archipelago, many slaves fled to the mountainous interior and formed maroon communities, the badius. They kept rhythms and traditions with strong African roots, such as batuku and funaná. That tension between European and African, between colonial power on the coast and resistance in the interior, runs through all of Cape Verdean culture. Out of that melting pot of pain and encounter came its language, its music and its identity.
Ribeira Grande's wealth made it a magnet for the pirates and privateers who swarmed the Atlantic. In 1585, the English privateer Sir Francis Drake sacked and laid waste to the city. The final blow came in 1712, when a French expedition led by Jacques Cassard destroyed Ribeira Grande. Exposed and impossible to defend despite its fortress, the city never recovered.
Power gradually moved to Praia, on a plateau that was easier to defend. Praia became established as the capital around 1770 and was officially confirmed as such in the 19th century. Meanwhile, the business that had given the islands their purpose went into crisis. Over the 19th century the Portuguese empire gradually abolished the slave trade and slavery: the morgado system (entailed estates) was abolished in 1863, and slavery was declared extinct in 1869, taking full effect the following decade. This left Cape Verde without its main source of income.
From then on, the islands went into long decline. Without the slave trade, the economy shrank to subsistence farming battered by drought and to serving as a port of call for ships. Cape Verde became a poor, forgotten colony. By the 20th century its main use to Lisbon would be geographical and political: a coaling station, a relay point for submarine cables and, at its most sinister, a prison for the regime. Slave-trade opulence had given way to destitution.
No word defines Cape Verde's modern history like drought. Lying on the edge of the Sahel, the islands depend on scarce, irregular rains, and when the rains fail, hunger is total. Between the late 16th and mid-20th centuries, the archipelago suffered a chain of devastating famines. The great droughts of the 18th and 19th centuries alone starved more than a hundred thousand people to death. In the 20th century, the famines of 1941-1943 and 1947-1948 claimed tens of thousands more lives.
The disaster was not only natural. Deforestation and overgrazing had destroyed the vegetation that held in moisture, and the Portuguese colonial government sent barely any relief during the great famines, leaving entire communities to die. Hunger became a collective experience burned into Cape Verdean memory and song.
The people's answer was to emigrate. From the late 18th century, American whalers from New England, especially from New Bedford, Massachusetts, recruited Cape Verdean sailors, opening the first great route of the diaspora. Others were sent, in conditions close to servitude, to the cocoa plantations of São Tomé and Príncipe: some 80,000 between 1900 and 1970. Over time, Cape Verdeans spread across the United States, Portugal, the Netherlands, Senegal and half the world. Today, several times more Cape Verdeans are estimated to live abroad than on the islands themselves. Emigration stopped being a tragedy and became a defining feature of the nation.
Under António de Oliveira Salazar's Estado Novo dictatorship, Cape Verde played a bitter role within the Portuguese empire. In 1936, the regime opened the Tarrafal concentration camp in the north of Santiago island, nicknamed the "camp of slow death". Portuguese anti-fascist opponents, and later nationalists from the African colonies, were deported there and often left to die. Tarrafal became a symbol of colonial repression and a place of remembrance for the whole Portuguese-speaking world.
At the same time, the islands were a remarkable intellectual cradle. A literate Creole elite was educated at the seminary-lyceum of São Nicolau and later at the lyceums of São Vicente and Praia. In 1936 the magazine Claridade was born in Mindelo, with figures such as Baltasar Lopes da Silva. It championed the Creole language and Cape Verdean identity against the myth of a mere Portuguese province. From that cultural awareness to the politics of independence was just one step.
In 1956, the agronomist and intellectual Amílcar Cabral, born to Cape Verdean parents and raised between the islands and Guinea, founded the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC) in Bissau. Cabral envisioned a joint struggle of the two colonies against Portugal and became one of the great theorists of African liberation. From 1963 the PAIGC waged a guerrilla war in Guinea-Bissau. In Cape Verde, where conditions did not allow armed struggle, clandestine resistance was being organised. The dream of freedom now had a name and an organisation.
The road to independence was full of tragedy and dizzying change. On 20 January 1973, Amílcar Cabral was assassinated in Conakry, just months before seeing his dream come true. Leadership of the PAIGC passed to his half-brother Luís Cabral and to leaders such as Aristides Pereira and Pedro Pires. On 24 September 1973, Guinea-Bissau unilaterally declared its independence.
The decisive turn came from Portugal itself. On 25 April 1974, the Carnation Revolution overthrew the Portuguese dictatorship, and the new government set out to end the costly colonial wars. In December 1974, Portugal and the PAIGC signed an agreement for a transitional government in Cape Verde. After elections to a National People's Assembly on 30 June 1975, the archipelago proclaimed its independence on 5 July 1975. Aristides Pereira, secretary-general of the PAIGC, became the first president, and Pedro Pires the first head of government.
The original plan went further: to unite Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau in a single state, as Cabral had imagined. But the pan-African dream soon fell apart. In November 1980, a coup in Guinea-Bissau led by João Bernardo "Nino" Vieira, with a strong anti-Cape Verdean element, buried the union. Cape Verde responded in 1981 by founding its own party, the PAICV (African Party for the Independence of Cape Verde). It went on as a sovereign, independent nation, master of its own destiny for the first time.
For its first fifteen years, Cape Verde was a one-party state governed by the PAICV. But in the early 1990s, under domestic pressure and a new international climate, the country took a step that would set it apart across Africa. In 1990 single-party rule was abolished, and in 1991 the first multi-party elections were held, in which the ruling PAICV peacefully handed power to the Movimento para a Democracia (MpD). Cape Verde thus became one of the first African countries to move peacefully, through the ballot box, from single-party rule to full democracy.
Since then, the MpD and PAICV have alternated in government time and again without upheaval, a rare case of stability on the continent. Cape Verde regularly tops Africa's rankings for good governance and freedoms and is considered a consolidated democracy. In 2007 it left the category of least developed country behind. Its bond with the diaspora is so close that Parliament reserves six of its seats for Cape Verdeans abroad, split between Africa, the Americas and Europe.
The emigrant's saudade found its purest expression in music. The morna is a melancholy song in Creole that combines voice, poetry and dance, and it became the soul of the nation. Its great ambassador was Cesária Évora (1941-2011), the "barefoot diva" from Mindelo who took Cape Verdean nostalgia to stages around the world. In 2019, UNESCO inscribed the morna on the list of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Today Cape Verde is a small country of ten islands and half a million people. It lives on tourism, remittances and a Creole culture that is its greatest wealth: living proof that a whole nation can be born from nothing, and from pain.
The 5 histories, one after another. Use the buttons above to jump to the one you want.
Fogo —"fire" in Portuguese— is, quite literally, a volcano rising from the sea. The whole island is the slope of a single, huge stratovolcano crowned by Pico do Fogo, which at 2.829 metres is the highest point in Cape Verde. It is the only truly active volcano in the archipelago and one of the most impressive mountains in the Atlantic.
Its history is marked by eruptions. In 1680, a major eruption forced part of the population to evacuate to the neighbouring island of Brava. Since then the volcano has erupted many times. The most recent eruption, between November 2014 and February 2015, buried the villages of Portela and Bangaeira, inside the crater, under lava and displaced almost a thousand people, who then stubbornly returned to rebuild their homes on top of the lava.
That love-and-danger relationship with the volcano defines Fogo. Its black, fertile volcanic soil is both threat and blessing: it destroys villages, but gives exceptional land for coffee and vines.
Fogo's most astonishing place is Chã das Caldeiras, a community that lives, against all logic, inside the volcano's caldera, right at the foot of Pico do Fogo. Its residents farm the land between lava fields and live with the certainty that, every so often, the volcano will roar again, as it did in 2014-2015 when it flattened their villages.
What keeps them clinging to this extreme landscape is, above all, the vine. Chã's volcanic soil grows the vines behind the celebrated Fogo wine, the "lava wine", whose origin tradition credits to a French nobleman who settled on the island in the 19th century. It is a singular wine, an emblem of Cape Verde's volcanic terroir, made in heroic conditions and now a product of national pride.
Chã das Caldeiras is also the starting point for the climb up Pico do Fogo, a tough but unforgettable hike to the roof of Cape Verde, with views over the sea of lava and the rest of the archipelago. Climbing the volcano and coming back down to taste its wine is one of the country's great experiences.
On Fogo's west coast, looking out to sea above black-sand beaches, stands São Filipe, the island's capital and one of the most elegant colonial towns in Cape Verde. Its cobbled streets are lined with sobrados, the stately two-storey mansions with pastel façades and wrought-iron balconies, the legacy of wealthy families who lived off the coffee and wine trade.
Coffee is, together with wine, Fogo's great product. Introduced by the Portuguese more than two centuries ago, the island's arabica coffee grows on the volcanic slopes of the municipality of Mosteiros, between 350 and 1.300 metres up, helped by the rich soil and humid microclimate. Fogo coffee has a reputation for excellence and is as much a part of the island's identity as its volcano.
São Filipe keeps that stately, quiet air of a faded colonial port, with its viewpoints over the Atlantic and the ever-present shadow of Pico do Fogo in the background. It is the gateway to the island and the best place to start understanding its culture of fire, coffee and wine.
West of Fogo, small and remote, lies Brava, the smallest of Cape Verde's inhabited islands. Green, mountainous and often wrapped in mist, it is known as "the island of flowers" for its abundant vegetation. Part of its current population descends from those who fled Fogo's eruptions in the 17th century and took refuge here.
Brava is also a land of emigrants and poets. Its links with 19th-century whaling tied the island closely to New England, and whole generations left from here for the United States. Brava was the birthplace and home of Eugénio Tavares (1867-1930), the great poet of morna, who wrote immortal verses in Cape Verdean Creole and helped give literary dignity to the people's language.
Today Brava remains a haven of absolute calm. It has no working airport, so the only way in is by ferry from Fogo, which keeps it out of mass tourism. Those who make the effort find walks among flowering mountains, quiet villages and the feeling of having reached the last corner of Cape Verde.
Sal and Boa Vista are the easternmost and flattest islands of Cape Verde, battered by wind and by centuries of drought. Sal was sighted in 1460 and first named Llana, "the flat one", but its name changed when its huge salt deposits were discovered in the craters of Pedra de Lume and at Santa Maria. For a long time the island was almost uninhabited, used only to graze cattle brought over from Boa Vista.
Serious exploitation arrived towards the end of the 18th century and in the 19th. The merchant Manuel António Martins drove salt extraction, brought families from Boa Vista and slaves from the African coast, and set up a salt industry that was, for decades, the island's engine. On Boa Vista, the English had already been working the salt since the 17th century, turning it into a stop on the Atlantic trade.
The symbol of that era is Pedra de Lume: an extinct volcanic crater connected to the sea by tunnels, whose salt pans produce water so salty —many times saltier than the ocean itself— that you float effortlessly, as in the Dead Sea. Today the salt industry is history, but its white landscapes remain one of the archipelago's great attractions.
When salt stopped paying, these islands seemed doomed to be forgotten. Their rescue came from the sky and the sea: their endless white-sand beaches, turquoise waters and constant winds turned them into Cape Verde's great sun-and-beach destination. Sal, with its international airport —named after Amílcar Cabral—, was the pioneer, and Santa Maria went from fishing village to the country's tourist capital.
Boa Vista followed the same path later. The opening of its international airport in 2007 brought the island out of its isolation and allowed direct flights from Europe, reorienting its economy towards tourism. Today its large hotel complexes sit alongside long, untouched beaches and the small, colourful capital, Sal Rei.
This shift brought prosperity, but also debates over water use, pressure on the coastline and the big-resort model. Even so, for millions of visitors, Sal and Boa Vista are the gateway to Cape Verde: the promise of the perfect beach that then reveals a country with far more history and culture than its sand suggests.
Of the ten islands, Boa Vista is the one most like the Sahara. The winds blowing across from Africa have covered much of it in golden sand dunes, such as the Viana desert, a small Sahara in the middle of the Atlantic. Its coasts, swept by currents and shoals, are littered with shipwrecks; the most famous is the Cabo Santa Maria, a stranded ship that sand and rust have turned into an icon of the island.
But Boa Vista's greatest treasure is alive. Its beaches, above all the wild and very long Praia de Santa Mónica, are one of the main nesting sites in the Atlantic for the loggerhead turtle (Caretta caretta). Every summer, the females come out of the sea at night to lay their eggs in the sand, a spectacle now protected by conservation programmes that involve local communities.
That mix of dunes, shipwrecks, waters teeming with life —humpback whales included, in season— and kilometres of untouched sand makes Boa Vista a nature destination in an almost pure state, a wild counterpoint to the more organised tourism of neighbouring Sal.
Santiago is the largest, most populous and oldest island of Cape Verde: the cradle of it all. It was here that Portuguese settlers founded Ribeira Grande in 1462. Now called Cidade Velha, it was the first permanent European settlement in the tropics and the capital of the archipelago for two and a half centuries. Its Ribeira Grande has been a World Heritage Site since 2009. It includes the marble pelourinho where slaves were punished, the church from 1495 and the São Filipe fortress from 1593.
Beyond Cidade Velha, Santiago was the main stage of the slave trade: thousands of enslaved Africans passed through its ports on their way to the Americas. But it was also the island of resistance. Many slaves fled to the mountainous interior and formed maroon communities, the badius, who held on firmly to their African roots. That double heritage, the colonial city on the coast and the rebellious interior, defines the island's character.
Today Santiago is home to nearly half the country's population, and its capital, Praia, is the political and economic centre of Cape Verde. It is the island where you feel the archipelago's African pulse most strongly, in its markets, its music and its people.
When pirate attacks made Ribeira Grande impossible to defend, power moved somewhere safer. The privateer Francis Drake had sacked the city in 1585, and Cassard's French force destroyed it in 1712. The new seat was a raised plateau above the sea, the Plateau, where Praia grew up. By around 1770 the city was already working as the capital, a status officially confirmed in the 19th century.
The Plateau, with its colonial layout of squares and government buildings, is still the city's historic centre. From there Praia spread out to become the country's largest city, home to the government, Parliament and the main commercial port. It is a bustling Creole capital, with markets like Sucupira, lively nightlife and a mix of rhythms ranging from funaná to world music.
Praia is the gateway to Cape Verde for many travellers and the best base for exploring Santiago: nearby Cidade Velha, the beaches of the north and the island's rural interior.
A few kilometres from Praia, at the mouth of a green valley, stands Cidade Velha, the former Ribeira Grande. It was the first European colonial city in the tropics and the great entrepôt of the Atlantic slave trade. Here, enslaved Africans were held and resold before being shipped to Brazil and the Caribbean. Its prosperity, built on that trade, made it a target for every pirate in the Atlantic.
The historic site keeps some exceptional landmarks. There is Rua Banana, one of the oldest streets in the colonial world, and the 16th-century marble pelourinho, a symbol of the punishment of slaves. There are the ruins of the cathedral and the church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário from 1495. High above stands the Fortaleza Real de São Filipe, completed in 1593. In 2009 UNESCO inscribed Cidade Velha on the World Heritage List.
Visiting Cidade Velha means looking into the place where Cape Verde and the world's first Creole society were born together, with all their weight of glory and horror. It is a must for understanding not just the archipelago, but the history of the Atlantic itself.
At the northern tip of Santiago, the town of Tarrafal opens onto one of the most beautiful bays in the country. It has a white-sand beach with calm water ringed by coconut palms and is the island's favourite seaside resort. But its name carries a dark memory. This was the site of the Tarrafal concentration camp, opened by the Portuguese dictatorship in 1936 and nicknamed the "camp of slow death".
Its barracks held Portuguese anti-fascist opponents first. In its second phase, they held nationalists from the African colonies who were fighting for independence. Many died of disease, heat and deliberate neglect. The camp closed for good with the end of colonial rule in 1974. Today it is a place of remembrance that Cape Verdean society honours as a museum of the resistance.
That mix of a beautiful landscape and a harsh history sums up Cape Verde well. Today Tarrafal invites you to swim in its bay, but also to remember the price paid for freedom.
Inland, Santiago shows its most African face. Around Assomada, capital of the municipality of Santa Catarina, beats the rural heart of the island: its market is one of the liveliest and most authentic in the country, a meeting point for farmers, fruit sellers and musicians. This mountainous region was a refuge for the badius, the descendants of runaway slaves who held on most strongly to African traditions.
That world gave birth to two of Cape Verde's most intense genres: batuku, a song and dance performed by women who keep the rhythm by beating rolled-up cloths on their laps, and funaná, accordion-and-iron music born in the interior of Santiago. Next to the melancholic morna of the northern islands, these rhythms are pure pulse, strength and African roots.
The landscape matches that intensity. Serra Malagueta Natural Park protects a green massif of peaks that brush the mist, trails between terraced fields and viewpoints over much of the island. It is one of the best places on Santiago to walk and feel the deep Cape Verde, the interior that never stopped resisting.
São Nicolau is a quiet, mountainous and little-visited island, tucked away in the north-centre of the archipelago. Its main town, Ribeira Brava, sits wedged between hills to protect it from pirates, with a colonial layout of narrow streets, a remarkable church and an authentic atmosphere far removed from mass tourism. But its importance in the history of Cape Verde goes well beyond its size.
In 1866 the Seminário-Liceu de São José was founded in Ribeira Brava, and for decades it was the main centre of higher education in the whole archipelago. A good part of the country's educated elite passed through its classrooms, and from there came a generation of intellectuals, priests and, above all, poets who would give voice to Cape Verdean identity. That is how the island earned its nickname as the cultural cradle of Cape Verde.
Key names in the country's literature came from São Nicolau, such as the poet José Lopes, and the great writer Baltasar Lopes da Silva, the driving force behind the Claridade movement, is linked to this tradition. In a nation forged by mixed heritage and emigration, São Nicolau supplied the words: the reflection on who Cape Verdeans were and on the value of their Creole language.
The roof of São Nicolau is Monte Gordo, a 1,312-metre peak protected as a natural park. Its summit, often capped with cloud and mist, catches the moisture carried by the winds and supports an island of green, humid vegetation in the middle of a largely arid island. It is one of the most important biodiversity strongholds in Cape Verde, with endemic plant species.
Monte Gordo park offers excellent walks: trails that climb through woodland, terraced fields and viewpoints from which, on clear days, you can take in almost the whole island and even spot other islands of the archipelago. It is the natural heart of São Nicolau and its main draw for travellers looking for hiking and peace and quiet.
Around the mountain, São Nicolau unfolds landscapes that are surprisingly varied for its size: farming valleys, fishing villages and spectacular volcanic formations. This is secret Cape Verde, the one you enjoy without crowds, true to the quiet, cultured character of the hidden island.
Like all of Cape Verde, São Nicolau lived in the shadow of drought and famine, and like every island it found its escape valve in emigration. From the 19th century onwards, its men signed on to the American whaling ships that called at the archipelago, opening a route that took generations of islanders to the Cape Verdean communities of New England. Departure and the longing of those who leave are an essential part of the island's life and poetry.
Those who stayed live from the sea and the land. The farming valleys produce maize, cassava and sugar cane —used to distil grogue—, while coastal towns such as Tarrafal de São Nicolau, blessed with a dry and healthy climate, are devoted to fishing in extremely rich waters, famous for tuna and other big fish.
This mix of emigration, sea and mountains gives São Nicolau a slow, deep rhythm. Less spectacular at first sight than the sandy islands or the Fogo volcano, it rewards the patient traveller with authenticity, hospitality and the feeling of being in the most genuine Cape Verde, the one least changed by tourism.
São Vicente had almost no history until the 19th century. Arid and unpopulated, its fate changed thanks to a quirk of geography: the bay of Porto Grande, a huge volcanic crater sunk into the sea that forms one of the best natural harbours in the Atlantic. In 1838, the British set up a coaling station there to refuel the steamships crossing to South America and the Indian Ocean, and Mindelo was born and grew around that business.
For decades, hundreds and even thousands of ships a year called at Mindelo to load coal brought from Cardiff. The city filled with English companies, consulates, a submarine cable from 1875 and a cosmopolitan life unique in the archipelago. When oil replaced coal, activity declined —there was a hard strike in 1912— and the Great Depression sank the refuelling business around 1930.
That port past, open to the world, left an indelible mark: Mindelo is the most cosmopolitan, bohemian and cultured city in Cape Verde, with its pastel colonial architecture, its cafés and its reputation as a "little tropical Lisbon". Economic decline did not dim its spirit; on the contrary, it poured it into culture.
Mindelo is, above all, the cultural capital of Cape Verde. It was here in 1936 that the magazine Claridade was born, championing the Creole language and Cape Verdean identity, and here that morna flourished, the melancholic song that expresses the emigrant's saudade. In its bars and hotels, Cesária Évora (1941-2011), a daughter of Mindelo, began singing in the 1960s: the "barefoot diva" who took the islands' music to the world's great stages.
Largely thanks to her international standing, morna was inscribed by UNESCO in 2019 as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Today the city honours its most famous singer with memorials and a music scene that never stops: on any corner of Mindelo there is live music, morna, coladeira and good conversation.
Mindelo is also the cradle of Cape Verde's most famous carnival, Brazilian in style, with troupes, drumming groups and costumes that take over the city every February. Port, music and celebration merge in a city that made its Creole soul its greatest heritage.
Across the channel from Mindelo, a short ferry ride takes you to Santo Antão, the second-largest island and one of the most spectacular in the archipelago. It is the flip side of the sand islands: a mountainous mass whose northern slope, exposed to the moist winds, is covered in a surprising, intense green. Deep ribeiras (valleys) run down from the peaks to the sea, sculpted by centuries of farming.
That water and that soil made Santo Antão a garden of terraced crops: sugar cane, maize, coffee, mangoes and fruit trees climb the slopes on terraces held up by stone walls. From the cane they distil grogue, Cape Verde's national spirit, which on Santo Antão is reputed to be the best, made in small traditional cane mills (trapiches).
Today Santo Antão is Cape Verde's hiking paradise. Its old cobbled paths, which linked villages perched on the mountains, offer some of the most impressive walks in West Africa, past sheer drops, flowering valleys and dizzying views over the ocean.
Hiking on Santo Antão revolves around three names. The first is the Valle do Paúl, the lushest on the island: a green, humid gash packed with cane, mangoes, papayas and grogue distilleries, which you walk by descending from the rim of the Cova crater, an old volcano turned into farmland inside the caldera.
The second is the northwest coast, where the village of Ponta do Sol, with its small harbour and colonial houses, is the starting point for the country's most famous walk: the coastal path to Fontainhas, a village hanging above cliffs that plunge straight into the ocean, considered one of the most beautiful and photographed villages in Cape Verde.
Ribeira Grande, the island's main town —not to be confused with the historic Ribeira Grande on Santiago—, is the base for exploring this whole world of valleys and mountains. Santo Antão rewards the traveller who walks: every trail is a journey through the rural, green and vertical Cape Verde that few imagine when they think of the archipelago.
Hardly anything that happened to Cape Verde happened on its own: these are the histories next door.
