For many people, the Vale do Paúl is the most beautiful corner of Santo Antão and one of the most striking sights in all Cabo Verde. Picture a deep, narrow valley falling from a volcanic crater to the Atlantic, covered from top to bottom in terraces of sugar cane, banana plants, mango trees and palms, with villages of small colourful houses clinging to the slopes and the constant murmur of water running through the irrigation channels. That's Paúl.
Its big draw is the hike that runs from one end to the other: the classic route that enters the Cova crater, looks over the rim of the valley and heads down cobbled paths and stone steps, through vegetable plots, coffee plantations and grogue distilleries, until it reaches the sea at Cidade das Pombas. It's a long descent but an accessible one, and the scenery changes at every bend: from the cool mist up high to the tropical heat at the bottom of the valley.
This guide tells you how to do the Cova-Paúl hike and other routes in the valley, how to visit the cane mills and stills where grogue is distilled and ponche is made, where to try highland coffee and goat's cheese, and where to sleep and eat among all that greenery. Paúl isn't a place to rush through: it's for walking slowly, greeting the farmers, raising a glass of grogue and understanding why people call this the most beautiful island in Cabo Verde.
The Vale do Paúl was settled in earnest in the 18th century, when sugar cane turned the humid valleys of Santo Antão into an orchard devoted to distilling grogue, the rum that is still the soul of the area. Watered by a system of channels that brings water down from the peaks, the valley filled with family cane mills and stills, terraced crops and a farming population that, through droughts and emigration, kept a unique agricultural landscape alive. Today that same rural world of cane, coffee, bananas and grogue is the setting for the most famous hike in the archipelago. The full story is 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, 30 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.
Cabo Verde is an arid archipelago, battered by centuries of drought, where water has always been the most precious resource. Against that backdrop, the Vale do Paúl is a lucky exception: a deep valley angled so that it catches the moisture carried by the trade winds, with springs high up and a microclimate that keeps it green almost all year round. Cabo Verdeans rightly call it one of the most fertile corners of the country.
That gift of geography explains its history. While much of the archipelago depended on fickle rains and suffered devastating famines, the humid valleys of Santo Antão, Paúl among them, could support intensive, year-round farming. For centuries, the water flowing down from the Cova crater and the peaks has been channelled through a network of irrigation ditches, the 'levadas', which carry it terrace by terrace all the way to the sea.
Everything else was built on that foundation: the terraced fields, the villages perched on the slopes, the cane mills and the stills. The Paúl is not an untouched natural landscape but a human work centuries in the making, carved with hoe and stone by generations of farmers who turned a volcanic gorge into a hanging garden.
When Santo Antão was fully settled in the 18th century, under the captaincy system, sugar cane became the king crop of its valleys. But unlike in the Caribbean or Brazil, the cane here was not grown so much to make sugar for export as to distil a spirit for local drinking: grogue. Across the Paúl and the neighbouring valleys, trapiches multiplied (mills where the cane is pressed, driven by oxen or by water power), along with the copper stills where the fermented juice is turned into spirit.
Grogue became much more than a drink: it is identity, economy and social ritual. It is drunk at wakes and at festivals, offered to whoever arrives, used as a home remedy, and it became Santo Antão's hallmark in the eyes of the rest of the country. Mixing grogue with cane syrup ('mel de cana') gives you ponche, sweeter and smoother. Every valley and every family boasts about its own recipe and its own distilling point.
That grogue culture survived every change and is still alive today in the Paúl, where dozens of small producers keep their trapiches running. The harvest season, between March and May, fills the valley with the smell of crushed cane and freshly distilled alcohol, and it is the best time to see the whole process, from cane field to glass.
Although luckier than other areas, the Paúl did not escape Cabo Verde's underlying drama: dependence on rain and the spectre of hunger. The great droughts of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries killed tens of thousands of people across the archipelago, and every bad season hit Santo Antão too, forcing people to tighten their belts and look outwards.
The answer, as everywhere in Cabo Verde, was emigration. From Mindelo, on neighbouring São Vicente, whalers and ships carried Cabo Verdeans to the United States, to Europe and to other African shores. Whole generations left the Paúl and the valleys of Santo Antão for New England, Portugal, the Netherlands or France. Many never came back; others returned with savings that became new houses, purchased land and improvements for the valley.
And so the Paúl's landscape was shaped by that very Cabo Verdean double reality: a tenacious farming world that keeps working the land, and an ever-present diaspora that supports families with remittances and comes home on holiday full of 'sodade'. The emigrant's longing and the attachment to the land live side by side in every village in the valley.
With Cabo Verde's independence in 1975, rural life on Santo Antão began to change. Irrigation and farm organisation improved, roads were built and widened, and in time electricity and running water reached the villages of the Paúl. Grogue production, once almost a household affair and sometimes frowned upon by the colonial authorities, came to be recognised and valued as part of the country's heritage.
The municipality of Paúl, with Cidade das Pombas as its seat, gained services and infrastructure, although life remained hard: farming on such steep slopes is exhausting work, and emigration kept tempting the young. The valley's balance between so many mouths, so much available land and so much water was always delicate, and remittances from the diaspora remained an essential lifeline.
At the same time, the Paúl's high-altitude coffee and its grogue began to earn a reputation beyond the island, prized for their quality. The valley started to be known not only for what it produced but for what it was: an exceptional landscape that would soon draw a new kind of visitor.
In recent decades, the Vale do Paúl has become the emblem of the hiking boom on Santo Antão. The walk down from the Cova crater to Pombas, along the old cobbled paths farmers used to carry their harvest downhill, has become the most famous route in the archipelago. Every year thousands of European hikers walk it and discover, bend after bend, one of the most beautiful farming landscapes in the Atlantic.
Around that flow of visitors, small-scale rural tourism took root: guesthouses with vegetable gardens, local guides, grogue and coffee tours, restaurants serving Creole food. This tourism was added to farming without replacing it, helping to slow the exodus and to give new value to the terraces, irrigation ditches and cane mills that were at risk of being abandoned. Today many families combine growing cane with hosting hikers or selling grogue and coffee directly.
The challenge, as everywhere on Santo Antão, is keeping the balance: making sure tourism supports the countryside instead of emptying it, and that the valley stays a living, working place rather than an uninhabited postcard. For now, the Paúl keeps its soul. It is both the traveller's dream hike and the home of farmers who, every morning, still open the sluice gates of the ditches to water their terraces of cane, coffee and bananas, just as it has been done for more than two hundred years.
