Pick two islands, and make them different from each other. Sal and Boa Vista are the flat ones: charter flights, long windward beaches, kitesurfing from November, the salt crater at Pedra de Lume, and loggerhead turtles nesting on Boa Vista through the late summer. São Vicente is the cultural island, and Mindelo is the best town in the country to spend an evening in. The hour-long ferry from there is the only way onto Santo Antão, which has no working airport and the best walking in the archipelago: the Cova crater down into the Paúl valley, and the cliff path past Fontainhas. Santiago is the working country, with Praia, the sixteenth-century streets of Cidade Velha and the mountain road north to Tarrafal. Fogo is a single volcano you climb from a village inside its own caldera, where the vineyards are planted in ash. Maio, São Nicolau and Brava are for a second trip. A week covers two islands properly. Ten days covers three.
1 Cape Verde city guide
Fun fact
Pico do Fogo erupted for 88 days from 23 November 2014, and the lava took the two villages inside its caldera with it. Portela and Bangaeira were evacuated, 994 people were displaced, and about three quarters of the buildings across Chã das Caldeiras were destroyed along with the only road in. Families moved back and replanted the vineyards in the new ash.
Stereotypes, sorted out
The realitySal and Boa Vista are built for that trip and do it well, but they are two islands out of the nine people live on. Santo Antão is a walking island with no working airport at all. Fogo is a volcano climbed from a village inside its own caldera. Santiago is a working country with a capital, a mountain road and the oldest European town in the tropics on its southern coast. The two flat islands are the least representative ones.
The realityCape Verde is African, Atlantic and Portuguese-speaking at once, and the islands were uninhabited until Portuguese ships arrived in the fifteenth century. What formed here is Creole: its own language, its own music, and a diaspora larger than the population still on the islands. Nothing about it reads as a smaller version of the mainland to the east.
The realityYou cannot. Ferries run published routes with real crossing times, and two of them carry most itineraries: Mindelo to Porto Novo for Santo Antão, and Praia to Fogo. Domestic flights are short, but the schedule has changed repeatedly in recent years and it is the part of the plan most likely to move. Book the hops first, then the days, and leave a night of slack before your flight home.
The realityIt barely rains at all. The dry season runs from November into July, and the wet months are August to October, when the valleys green up and the waterfalls run. Santo Antão’s windward side is the wettest ground in the country and is still nothing like a monsoon belt. What most often flattens a view is not rain but Sahara dust, carried across on the harmattan between December and March.
Cape Verdean etiquette, briefly
- Greet before you ask. A bom dia or boa tarde comes first, in a shop, a minibus or an office, and skipping it lands badly.
- Portuguese is the language of government and signage. Kriolu is what people actually speak, and it changes between the northern and southern islands. A few words are received well and nobody expects fluency.
- Ask before photographing people, particularly in the valley villages of Santo Antão and Fogo where visitors are still a novelty.
- Haggling is not the norm. Market prices sit close to fixed, and pushing hard reads as rude rather than shrewd.
- Beachwear stays on the beach. Walking into a town centre or a church in swimwear is noticed on every island.
- Water is scarce and largely desalinated. Long showers are a visitor habit, and the drier islands feel it.
- Carry cash outside the resort areas. Card machines are normal in Santa Maria and Praia and scarce in a mountain village.
Famous Cape Verdean faces
Cesária Évora
Amílcar Cabral
Aristides Pereira
Pedro Pires
José Maria Neves
Germano Almeida
Arménio Vieira
Baltasar Lopes da Silva
Eugénio Tavares
Bana
Mayra Andrade
Edy Tavares
Must-try Cape Verdean food
Cachupa
The national dish and the one to judge a kitchen on: hominy corn and beans cooked slowly with whatever else the house has, cassava, sweet potato, squash, sausage or fish. Fried the next morning with an egg on top it becomes cachupa refogada, and that is breakfast.
Queijo de cabra
Fresh goat cheese, white and faintly sour, from Fogo and Santo Antão. Served with papaya jam, which sounds wrong and is not.
Grogue
Sugarcane spirit distilled on Santo Antão and Santiago, often at a family trapiche that has been running for generations. It appears at the end of a meal without being asked for.
Caldo de peixe
Fish soup built on whatever came in that morning, with cassava and green banana in it. Order it in a harbour town rather than a hotel.
Atum grelhado
Tuna is the country’s fish, and it is served thick, seared and pink in the middle. A kitchen that cooks it through is not paying attention.
Lagosta grelhada
Spiny lobster, grilled and split. It is on every menu on Sal and Boa Vista, and it is better in the harbour restaurants where the boats actually land.
Búzio guisado
Sea snails stewed down with tomato, onion and bay until they give in. More of a bar dish than a restaurant one, and better for it.
Xerém
Coarse-ground corn cooked to a porridge, plain beside a stew or built up with pork, beans and bay for the festival version.
Djagacida
Rice and beans cooked together over a sofrito of onion, garlic and bay. The everyday plate, and usually the one under the grilled fish.
Pastel com diabo dentro
Pastry with the devil inside: a sweet potato and corn dough parcel fried around tuna, onion and chilli. The devil is the chilli, and it is not always subtle.
Gufong
Fried corn-flour dough with cane syrup worked through it, a Santo Antão snack eaten warm and rarely sold anywhere smart.
Ponche
Grogue cut with molasses and lime. Sweeter than the spirit it is built on, and considerably stronger than it tastes.
Vinho do Fogo
Wine from vines planted in volcanic ash inside the Chã das Caldeiras caldera, the only place in Cape Verde growing grapes in any quantity. Dry, mineral and worth the detour up the mountain.
Café do Fogo
Coffee grown on the volcano’s slopes in small quantities. Fogo is the only island producing it at any scale, and it is sold by the bag in São Filipe.