Ribeira Grande, known to everyone as 'Povoação', is the heart of northern Santo Antão and the best starting point for discovering the greenest and most mountainous island in Cape Verde. It was one of the first settlements on the island and still has a few colonial buildings and an 18th-century church, but what makes it a must isn't the town itself, it's what surrounds it: an amphitheatre of terraced valleys, knife-edge ridges and improbable villages perched above the ocean.
Santo Antão is, quite simply, the hiking mecca of Cape Verde. From Ribeira Grande and the neighbouring villages of Ponta do Sol and Paúl, the archipelago's most famous walks set off: down the Cova crater through the lush Paúl valley, along the clifftop coast between Ponta do Sol and Fontainhas, or from valley to valley on cobbled paths that farming families have used for centuries. All with the murmur of the Atlantic below and the smell of sugar cane, coffee and grogue in the air.
This guide uses Ribeira Grande as a base for exploring the northeast of the island: which hikes to do and how hard they are, how to get here from Mindelo by ferry, how to get between valleys by aluguer, where to try artisanal grogue and ponche, and where to sleep and eat at an easy pace. Santo Antão is not a beach island: it's an island for walking, breathing deeply and losing yourself in one of the most beautiful rural landscapes in the Atlantic.
Ribeira Grande de Santo Antão began as one of the first settlements on an island that Portugal left almost uninhabited for two centuries and only settled in earnest in the 18th century, when the Count of Santa Cruz was granted its captaincy. Its fertile valleys, watered by streams from the peaks, filled with sugar cane and the grogue stills that are still the soul of the rural economy today. Cut off from the rest of the country by the lack of a port and an airport, the island held on to a farming world of terraces, irrigation channels and stone paths that is now its greatest asset for visitors. The full story, from colonial captaincy to trekking mecca, 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) →Some places make no sense on your own; with someone explaining them, they change completely. We look ours up on Civitatis: guided in Spanish and booked online with no fuss. There are not many in Ribeira Grande Santo Antao, but the ones there are worth it. Tap the cards below and have a look.
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Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Santo Antão, the westernmost and most mountainous island of Cabo Verde, was sighted by Portuguese navigators around 1462, in the early years of colonisation of the archipelago, which until then had been uninhabited. Tradition says it was named on Saint Anthony's Day, and from the sea its steep, cloud-capped bulk must have been striking, so different from the flat, arid islands to the east.
Yet for almost two centuries Santo Antão stayed on the margins of colonial history. The centre of power and trade was on Santiago, in Ribeira Grande de Santiago (today's Cidade Velha), the first European city in the tropics and a major market of the Atlantic slave trade. Santo Antão, with no good natural harbour and cut off from the rest by the rough São Vicente channel, served mainly as grazing land for the big landowners, with very few permanent residents.
That relative isolation shaped its character: while other islands were organised around the slave trade and large slave-worked estates, Santo Antão filled up slowly, with peasants, herders and freed slaves who gradually settled its fertile valleys. The island came late to the 'big history' of Cabo Verde, but in return it built the rural world of terraces, irrigation channels and stone villages that is its hallmark today.
Systematic settlement of Santo Antão came in the 18th century. In 1732 the Portuguese crown granted the captaincy (donataria) of the island to António de Barros Bezerra, and later the title of Count of Santa Cruz became tied to the lordship. Under this seigneurial system, the northern valleys —Ribeira Grande, Paúl, Ribeira da Torre— were divided into estates and began to be farmed intensively, using the water that flows down from the damp peaks.
The great economic engine was sugar cane, though less for making sugar than for distilling a spirit: grogue. The valleys filled with trapiches —cane mills driven by oxen or by water power— and with stills producing the spirit that became a symbol of the island's identity and a currency of rural life. Alongside the cane grew bananas, highland coffee, mangoes, sweet potatoes and vegetables, in a patchwork of terraces watered by an ingenious system of irrigation channels (levadas) that still works today.
Ribeira Grande, at the mouth of the main valley in the north-east, became the chief town of this farming district. A church, manor houses and warehouses went up, and the 'Povoação' turned into the meeting place and market of an island that, despite its isolation, fed much of the archipelago with its fruit, coffee and grogue.
The history of Cabo Verde is scarred by the tragedy of drought. In a country with no permanent rivers and at the mercy of unpredictable rains, bad seasons recurred for centuries with terrible consequences: famines that in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries killed tens of thousands of people across the archipelago. Santo Antão, rainier and greener than other islands thanks to its mountains, suffered somewhat less, but it did not escape hardship or dependence on the harvest.
That chronic insecurity pushed whole generations to emigrate. From the 19th century onwards, thousands of Cabo Verdeans —many of them from Santo Antão— left aboard the whaling ships and vessels that called at Mindelo, bound for the United States (especially New England), and later for Portugal, the Netherlands, France or Senegal. Emigration became a defining part of the country's culture: 'sodade', the bittersweet longing of those who leave and those who stay, is the national feeling par excellence.
On Santo Antão, emigration left valleys worked by families living on remittances from distant relatives, houses built 'with money from abroad' and a population that rises and falls with the opportunities. The island also lived cut off from the rest of the country: with no working airport and a rough sea in between, it always depended on the boat for everything, which reinforced its reserved character and its strong rural identity.
Cabo Verde became independent from Portugal on 5 July 1975, after the struggle of the PAIGC led by Amílcar Cabral (assassinated in 1973, before he could see independence). For Santo Antão, the new era brought deep changes to the countryside: land reforms, better irrigation, new roads —among them the legendary Estrada da Corda, cobbled by hand along the ridge— and the gradual arrival of electricity and running water in the valleys.
The old seigneurial world of cane and grogue did not disappear, but it changed. Much land changed hands, cooperatives and small producers took over, and grogue went from being an almost homemade product to having designations of origin and growing recognition as a gastronomic product. Even so, life remained hard: farming on steep slopes is exhausting work, and emigration kept emptying villages while remittances kept the remaining ones going.
In recent decades, better connections —the regular ferry from Mindelo, the new coastal road to Ribeira Grande— have brought the island out of its extreme isolation. Santo Antão began to see itself not only as a farming backwater but as an exceptional landscape able to attract a new kind of visitor: the one who comes to walk.
From the 2000s onwards, Santo Antão built a growing reputation among European hikers, especially Germans, French and Portuguese, who found in its valleys one of the best trekking destinations in the whole Atlantic. The same cobbled paths that farming families had used for centuries to carry down the harvest or go to Mass became waymarked hiking routes: the crossing from the Cova crater down to the Paúl valley, the coastal walk from Ponta do Sol to Fontainhas, the ridge traverses between villages.
Ribeira Grande, Ponta do Sol and Cidade das Pombas filled up with small guesthouses, local guides and agencies running hikes, grogue tours and visits to the coffee plantations. Rural tourism, on a human scale and spread widely among families, joined farming as a source of income, helping to slow depopulation and to give value to a heritage —the terraces, the irrigation channels, the trapiches, the stone architecture— that was at risk of being lost.
Today Santo Antão strikes a delicate balance between its farming soul and its tourist calling. Above all it is still an island of farmers who get up early to water their terraces of cane and coffee; but it is also the dream destination for travellers who want to walk for days on end among green mountains, sleep in stone villages and end the day with a glass of grogue, watching the sun sink into the Atlantic. That blend of tradition and landscape is where its unique charm lies.
