Ponta do Sol is Cabo Verde's end of the world: the northernmost town in the country, a little colonial port of low houses and cobbled streets looking out over the Atlantic, with a calm, bohemian vibe that wins you over. For decades it was Santo Antão's main port, and it still has the old pier, the odd manor house and a square where, in the afternoons, people have a coffee or a grogue while watching the waves break.
But the real star of the area is the coastal hike to Fontainhas and Cruzinha da Garça. Shortly after leaving Ponta do Sol, the trail reaches a dizzying balcony from which Fontainhas comes into view: a handful of colourful little houses perched on a rocky spur between two ravines, surrounded by sugar cane terraces, with the ocean pounding hundreds of metres below. It is probably the most famous postcard view in all of Cabo Verde.
This guide tells you how to walk the coast between Ponta do Sol, Fontainhas and Cruzinha, how difficult the trail is and how to do it safely, how to get there from Mindelo and get around the north of the island, and where to eat fresh fish, listen to live music and sleep by the sea. Ponta do Sol has no white-sand beaches: it has cliffs, improbable villages and one of the most thrilling coastal landscapes in the Atlantic.
For a long time Ponta do Sol was Santo Antão's main port, the gateway to the world for an island with no airport and with fertile valleys full of coffee, sugar cane and grogue. Goods and emigrants bound for other islands and overseas passed through its old pier, until the port of Porto Novo, in the south, took over its role. Fontainhas, the neighbouring village hanging from the cliff, embodies the island's farming tenacity: houses and terraces clinging to the rock above the void. Today the area is synonymous with the best coastal hiking in the country. The full story is told on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Cape Verde's cosmopolitan and green north: Mindelo, the city of coal, carnival and Cesária Évora's morna, and across the water Santo Antão, an island of valleys and the best hiking in the country.
Read the history of São Vicente and Santo Antão (the creative north) →They depart from Mindelo, 36 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Ponta do Sol was born and grew up as a port. On an island with no airport and a rugged coastline, almost all contact with the outside world depended on the sea, and the northern tip of Santo Antão offered one of the few usable anchorages. In colonial times, a town grew up around that landing stage and became the island's main point of arrival and departure. Goods passed over its quay, along with coffee, sugar cane and grogue from the valleys, and so did the emigrants leaving to make a living far away.
That role as a port gave Ponta do Sol a prosperity and an urban feel that you can still sense in its layout: cobbled streets, stately houses, a central square and administrative buildings. For part of its history it was the municipal seat and capital, a place with some cultural and commercial life and Santo Antão's window onto the rest of Cape Verde and overseas.
Over time, however, the port of Porto Novo grew in the south of the island. It was better sheltered and linked by road to Ribeira Grande and to the ferry to São Vicente, and it gradually took the spotlight. Ponta do Sol lost its role as the great gateway by sea and became what it is today: a quiet town at the far end of the north, with a nostalgia for its former splendour and a bohemian charm that wins visitors over.
A stone's throw from Ponta do Sol, the village of Fontainhas is the very picture of Cape Verdean farming tenacity. Its colourful houses huddle on a narrow spur of rock between two deep ravines, surrounded by terraces of sugar cane that drop towards the sea on dizzying slopes. That anyone decided to live and farm in such a place says a lot about the history of Santo Antão. On a mountainous island with little flat land, every usable corner was settled and worked, however impossible it seemed.
Fontainhas was settled where there was water (its name refers to springs) and where the hillside, steep as it was, still allowed terraces to be cut. Generations of families built stone walls, channelled water and planted sugar cane, bananas and vegetables, in a precarious balance with gravity and the ocean. Like the whole north of the island, the village always lived off the land and off emigration, sending people abroad and receiving remittances.
Today Fontainhas is, without ever trying, the most famous postcard image of Cape Verde. It appears in guidebooks, documentaries and tourism campaigns all over the world. But it is still a real, lived-in village, where neighbours farm their terraces and walk up the same paths that hikers now follow. That authenticity is part of its strength: it is a living village, not a stage set.
The north of Santo Antão is criss-crossed by a network of cobbled paths that for centuries were the only links between towns and villages. Before there were roads, everything moved on foot or by donkey along these paths, which communities built and maintained by hand. People used them to get to market, to Mass and to school, to carry the harvest down to the port or to take grogue from valley to valley.
The coastal path linking Ponta do Sol with Fontainhas, Corvo and Cruzinha da Garça is one of these old paths, carved into the rock of the cliffs. The people of the northern villages used it because they were isolated and had no other way to stay in touch. Their journeys look like feats to us today, but for them they were part of everyday life. Every wall, every step and every stretch hanging above the sea is the work of that community labour, built up over generations.
When hiking tourism reached Santo Antão, those farmers' paths became sought-after trekking routes. What had been a necessity, getting around the mountains on foot, became a tourist attraction. Without realising it, the traveller walking the coast from Ponta do Sol to Cruzinha today is walking through the everyday history of a people who moved along these same cliffs for centuries.
Like all of Cape Verde, the north of Santo Antão has been shaped by emigration. Droughts, a lack of land and the hardship of rural life drove whole generations to leave for the United States, Portugal, the Netherlands and France. Many people left Ponta do Sol, once a port of embarkation, and villages like Fontainhas and never came back. Others returned with savings to build a house or buy a plot of land.
That shared experience of those who leave and those who stay gave rise to the most Cape Verdean feeling of all: 'sodade', a sweet and painful nostalgia that runs through the country's music. Morna and coladeira, both genres born in Cape Verde, sing of departure, the sea, distance and love for a faraway homeland. Ponta do Sol, with its bohemian atmosphere and live music bars, keeps that musical tradition alive.
So the north of Santo Antão is both a place of dazzling beauty and a land marked by absence. Its towns have children scattered across the world, its houses were built with money from the diaspora, and its music turns the sadness of separation into something beautiful. Understanding 'sodade' helps you see Fontainhas and Ponta do Sol differently: not just as a postcard, but as the cherished home of a travelling people.
In recent decades, Ponta do Sol and Fontainhas have become one of Cape Verde's big tourist draws, driven by the hiking boom on Santo Antão. The image of Fontainhas clinging to the cliff has travelled around the world, and the coastal walk to Cruzinha has earned a place among the country's most admired routes. Quiet and bohemian, Ponta do Sol has become a favourite base for hikers and travellers who are after authenticity rather than resorts.
This small-scale, widely spread tourism has brought guesthouses, fish restaurants, local guides and music bars. It has given an economic breather to an area that historically depended on farming and remittances. Unlike the sandy islands, where the big all-inclusive hotel rules, the north of Santo Antão has developed a more intimate kind of tourism, built around nature, culture and personal contact.
The challenge is to make sure this growth doesn't spoil what makes the place special: Fontainhas has to stay a living village and not a film set, the paths need looking after, and the benefits need to reach local people. For now, Ponta do Sol keeps its essence, with its fishermen, farmers, Creole music and sunsets over the Atlantic. It is still one of those places where travellers feel they have truly reached the end of the world.
