Santa Maria is postcard Cape Verde: miles of fine white-sand beach, warm turquoise water, palm trees and sunshine almost guaranteed all year. It's the country's big beach resort, at the southern tip of the island of Sal, and the destination that put Cape Verde on the map for European beach holidays. What was once a modest salt village is now a lively resort town with hotels, restaurants, bars and water sports schools.
But Santa Maria is much more than sunloungers and cocktails: it's one of the best places in the world for kitesurfing and windsurfing, thanks to the steady trade winds; an excellent base for diving among wrecks and reefs; and a starting point for spotting sea turtles, which nest on the island, and humpback whales, which pass through its waters between March and May. The wooden pontão, with its fish market and boats, is the most iconic image of the whole island.
This guide takes a practical look at Santa Maria: the beach and the pontão, water sports, excursions around the island of Sal (the Pedra de Lume salt flats, the Buracona cave and its 'Blue Eye'), where to eat good fish, and how to make the most of Cape Verde's sunniest, most laid-back destination, ideal for combining rest and adventure on the water.
Santa Maria was founded in the 19th century as a port for exporting the salt extracted on the island of Sal (hence the island's name), mainly from the Pedra de Lume salt flats. When the salt trade declined in the 20th century, the village was almost forgotten, until tourism rediscovered it from the 1980s and 1990s onwards: its beaches and constant wind made it Cape Verde's first major sun-and-beach destination. Today it's the engine of the country's tourism. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓The flat eastern islands, golden with salt and dunes: they first lived off the salt in their craters, and today off beach tourism, kitesurfing and the turtles that nest in their sand.
Read the history of Sal and Boa Vista (the sand islands) →They depart from Pedra De Lume, 19 km away. If you book from this link we earn a commission and you pay no more.
No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Sal Island owes its name to what was for centuries its only wealth: salt. It is one of the oldest islands in Cape Verde, geologically speaking. Ancient volcanic eruptions formed it, and then wind and sea wore it down into a flat, arid, almost desert island, very different from the mountainous islands to the south and north. It hardly ever rains, and the landscape is a stretch of ochre earth, dunes and salt flats under a relentless sun.
When the Portuguese came across it in the 15th century, the island was uninhabited and didn't seem to offer much: no fresh water, no forests, no fertile soil. For a long time it was just a stopover, used for raising goats and little else. But it hid a treasure. In the crater of an old volcano at Pedra de Lume, and in other hollows near the sea, the water evaporated and left behind huge amounts of excellent-quality salt.
In those centuries salt was an extremely valuable commodity, essential for preserving meat and fish before refrigeration. From the 18th century, and above all in the 19th, salt extraction on the island stepped up, and exporting it called for a port in the south, close to the best beaches and to the sea. That is how Santa Maria was born.
Santa Maria was founded in the first half of the 19th century as a settlement and port for exporting salt. The town grew up around the salt trade. Salt extracted inland was carried to the coast and loaded onto ships at Santa Maria, bound for markets in West Africa, Brazil and Europe. The pontão, the wooden pier that is now the town's best-known image, dates back to those port days.
For decades salt drove the island's economy, and it even drew foreign investors and companies. The most famous operation was in the Pedra de Lume crater, where in the early 20th century a cable car and a tunnel were built to carry the salt out to the sea. Santa Maria lived off that business, with its salt pans, its warehouses and its shipping traffic.
But salt was a fragile business. Refrigeration reduced the need to salt food. Other sources of salt were cheaper and easier to reach. On top of that, shipping from a remote island was hard work. Over the 20th century these problems wore the industry down. Little by little the salt pans stopped paying their way, and Santa Maria, which depended on them, went into decline.
With the decline of salt, Santa Maria shrank to a small, quiet fishing village, almost forgotten at the southern tip of an arid island. For much of the 20th century Cape Verde struggled with droughts and famines and, in the end, fought for independence from Portugal, which it won in 1975. All that time, Sal and its salt town stayed on the sidelines. Their only obvious assets were the sea and some spectacular beaches that nobody valued yet.
Ironically, the dryness that had seemed like a curse would become Sal's greatest blessing. Once international tourism arrived, three things the island had turned out to be gold: sunshine almost every day of the year, miles of white-sand beaches and turquoise water, and a steady wind ideal for water sports. All that was missing was for the world to discover it.
The airport was a key factor. Since the mid-20th century Sal had been home to Amílcar Cabral International Airport. For a long time it was the only airport in Cape Verde that could handle large aircraft, and it was an important refuelling stop on air routes between Europe, Africa and the Americas. When the time came, that airport would make the island the natural gateway for tourism to the archipelago.
From the 1980s, and especially in the 1990s and 2000s, Santa Maria went through a radical transformation. Cape Verde was now independent and on its way to becoming a stable democracy, and it bet on tourism to drive development. Sal Island, with its international airport and its beaches, led the way. European tour operators began scheduling charter flights, and big all-inclusive resorts sprang up on the outskirts of the old salt town.
Kitesurfing and windsurfing added an extra draw. The constant trade winds made Santa Maria one of the best spots in the Atlantic for wind sports, attracting an international community of enthusiasts. Diving, turtle and whale watching and trips around the island rounded out what was on offer. In just a couple of decades, Santa Maria went from forgotten village to Cape Verde's leading tourist destination.
Today tourism drives Sal's economy and is one of the main sources of income for the whole country. Santa Maria holds most of Cape Verde's hotel capacity and welcomes travellers from all over Europe. Salt gave the island its name and its town a reason to exist. Now it is little more than a picturesque memory at the Pedra de Lume salt flats, which have become a tourist attraction. Sal's new gold is the sun.
Today's Santa Maria is a cosmopolitan destination. The old village of fishermen and salt workers, with its colourful houses, its pontão and its fish market, lives side by side with the modern machinery of international tourism: resorts, kite schools, Italian restaurants and beach clubs. It is the most 'European' and accessible side of Cape Verde, the one most visitors get to know.
That success also brings tensions. The all-inclusive resort model depends heavily on foreign operators. It creates jobs, but sometimes leaves little money in the local economy. Fast growth also strains water supplies (on Sal, water comes from desalination), energy and sustainability on a fragile desert island. Many Cape Verdeans from other islands move to Sal to work in tourism.
Even so, Santa Maria keeps its charm: the pontão at dawn with the fishing boats, the turquoise bay, kitesurfers riding the wind, fresh grilled fish and Creole music in the bars at sunset. This is where the dryness of an island that seemed doomed became Cape Verde's greatest tourist treasure. And it is where the old story of salt has dissolved, quite literally, into the sea and the sun that now draw the world.
