Five islands in the order the boats and the one turboprop make sense. Santiago's ruled hillsides and the camp at Tarrafal, a volcano climbed from the village its lava buried in 2014, the smallest inhabited island in the country with no working airstrip, then Mindelo and the ferry to Santo Antão, where the ravines are farmed to the ridgeline and the old road is laid by hand in cobbles.
Praia
Arrive, change money and walk the Plateau, which is the old town on its flat-topped hill and the whole of colonial Praia — grid, praça, two churches and the Ethnographic Museum. Down the steps on the east side is Sucupira, the largest market in the country, where most of what the islands import is resold. Buy a SIM before leaving the capital.
Cidade Velha
Fifteen kilometres west along the coast. Ribeira Grande was founded in 1462 and was the first permanent European settlement in the tropics; it grew rich as the clearing house of the Atlantic slave trade and was sacked by Francis Drake in 1585, after which the crown — Portuguese, but held by Spain for the sixty years of the Iberian Union — put the Fortaleza Real de São Filipe on the ridge above it, finished in 1593. The marble pillory in the square went up around 1520, and the church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário behind it at the end of the fifteenth century; the church is usually called the oldest colonial church still standing anywhere. UNESCO listed the town in 2009.
North over the island
Up the spine of Santiago through São Jorge dos Órgãos, where the agricultural research station sits in the greenest valley on the island, then Assomada for the market — Wednesdays and Saturdays are the big days — and over the Serra Malagueta pass at just over a thousand metres. Look at the hillsides on the way: courses of dry stone along every contour, and walls across the ravine beds. Tarrafal is at the end of the road with the only genuinely sheltered bay on Santiago.
The camp at Tarrafal
Two kilometres inland at Chão Bom. The Estado Novo opened it in 1936 for Portuguese political prisoners and it was known as the campo da morte lenta — the camp of slow death. It closed in 1954, reopened in 1961 for nationalists from Guinea, Angola and Cabo Verde, and shut for good on 1 May 1974, days after the Carnation Revolution. It is now the Museu da Resistência and the cells, the punishment block and the infirmary are as they were. Then back south to Praia for the flight.
São Filipe and up to the caldera
The morning in São Filipe, which is two-storey sobrado townhouses on a bluff above black sand and the handsomest town in the islands. Then the climb east: 30 kilometres and 1,700 metres of ascent to Chã das Caldeiras, a floor of ash and lava inside the Bordeira, the caldera wall that rises a kilometre on three sides and is open on the fourth. Vines grow in the lava here and the co-operative presses them.
Pico do Fogo
Leave at first light with a guide. The cone rises 1,100 metres out of the caldera floor to 2,829 metres, the highest ground in Cabo Verde; three to four hours up on ash and rubble, then a scree descent that takes about an hour and ruins your boots. On the way down cross the 2014 flow. The eruption began on 23 November that year from a vent beside Pico Pequeno, ran for eleven weeks, and buried Portela and Bangaeira — the two villages you are sleeping in, which were rebuilt on top of their own lava.
Down and across to Brava
Back down to São Filipe in the morning and onto the boat at Vale de Cavaleiros. The channel is about an hour and it is regularly the roughest hour of the trip. Furna is a harbour with nothing behind it; the road climbs 500 metres in a few kilometres to Vila Nova Sintra, which sits on a green plateau and looks nothing like the island you can see from the sea.
Fajã d'Água
Brava is the smallest inhabited island and the one that emptied hardest — its men crewed American whalers out of New Bedford from early in the nineteenth century and their descendants are still in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, which is why the money here arrives in dollars. Eugénio Tavares, who wrote the mornas that Cesária Évora made the country's export, was born here in 1867 and is buried in the town. Walk down the Fajã d'Água valley to the sea — a couple of hours, mostly downhill, and an aluguer back up.
North, in two moves
The connection day, and the one to protect. Morning boat back to São Filipe, afternoon flight to Praia. Keep the evening free: this is the day that absorbs a cancelled sailing, and if the sailing went ahead you have a night in the capital, which is when the Plateau bars put on funaná and batuku and the city is better than it is at noon.
Mindelo
Fifty minutes north-west to São Vicente. Porto Grande is a drowned crater and the British put a coal depot in it in 1838, then spent fifty years bunkering every steamer crossing the Atlantic, which is where Mindelo's cricket, its brass bands and half its street names came from. The trade died with coal and the town has run on music since. Mercado do Peixe in the morning, the 1918 customs house built as a copy of the Torre de Belém, Laginha beach, and Monte Cara across the water.
The ferry and the cobbled road
An hour across the channel to Porto Novo. Santo Antão has no airport in service — the strip at Ponta do Sol closed around 2000 because of the wind — so this boat is the island. Cross by the Estrada da Corda, the colonial road laid entirely in hand-cut cobbles, which climbs to 1,600 metres, runs along the rim of the Cova de Paúl crater and drops into Ribeira Grande. Sleep at Ponta do Sol, the northern tip.
Cova down to Paúl
Drive up to the rim of the Cova de Paúl, an extinct crater with fields inside it, and walk out through the notch and down the Ribeira do Paúl to the sea — four to five hours and about 1,500 metres of descent, rim to shoreline, past terraces of cane, yam, mango and coffee stacked on both walls of the valley. There are trapiches near the bottom distilling grogue from cane crushed on the spot. Come out at Vila das Pombas on the coast road.
The coast path to Cruzinha
West out of Ponta do Sol on a path cut into the cliff, high above the water, to Fontainhas — a village on a spur with the sea on three sides of it — then Corvo, Formiguinhas and down to Cruzinha da Garça. Four to five hours. For most of the twentieth century this was not a walk but the road, and everything those villages ate came along it on somebody's head. An aluguer runs back to Ponta do Sol on the coast road.
Back across and out
The coast road south to Porto Novo, which is the newer route and takes about an hour and a quarter, then the ferry to Mindelo. If the flight is late, go up Monte Verde — 750 metres, a road most of the way, and the whole of São Vicente and Santo Antão from the top. Fly out of Cesária Évora airport, renamed after her death for the woman who sang in the bars down the hill.
Good to know
EU, UK, US, Canadian, Swiss and Norwegian passports need no visa for short stays, but everyone must complete the online pre-registration a few days before flying and pay an airport security fee — currently 3,400 escudos, about €31 — which is collected at pre-registration or on arrival, and which is revised periodically, so check the figure rather than the last blog that quoted it. There is no malaria: the WHO certified Cabo Verde malaria-free on 12 January 2024, the third country in its African Region to be certified after Mauritius and Algeria, so no prophylaxis and no argument with a travel clinic about it. Dengue is a different matter — the mosquito that carries it bites by day and the 2009 outbreak was large — so repellent still earns its place. A yellow fever certificate is demanded only of travellers aged one and over arriving from a country with risk of transmission, and transit counts. The escudo has been pegged since 1998 — to the Portuguese escudo first, then to the euro when that replaced it — at 110.265 to the euro, so the conversion is exact; euros are taken almost everywhere at a worse rate, cards work in Praia, Mindelo and Sal and in very few places outside them, and Chã das Caldeiras, Brava and the Santo Antão valleys are cash. The two crossings that matter are run by CV Interilhas: Mindelo–Porto Novo goes several times daily and takes about an hour, while São Filipe–Brava runs a few times a week and is rough enough that people take something for it. Neither Brava nor Santo Antão has a working airport — Ponta do Sol closed around 2000 and Brava's strip at Esperadinha has had no scheduled service for years, both because of wind — so the boat is the only way on and off, and the slack day belongs before the international flight, not after it. Aluguers are shared Hiace minibuses with no timetable: they leave when full, run mostly in the morning, thin out after lunch and largely stop on Sundays. Self-drive is realistic on Santiago and São Vicente and a bad idea on Santo Antão and Fogo — take a car with a driver, because the Corda is single-track cobbles with a long drop and the road up to Chã was rebuilt after the 2014 lava took the old one. Pico do Fogo needs a guide from Portela; the Parque Natural do Fogo takes a small entry fee at the village, a few hundred escudos, and the guide is the part that costs — reckon on a few thousand, agreed before you start walking, and hire through the village association rather than at the guesthouse door. The rains, as águas, fall roughly August to October and are what make Fogo and Santo Antão green; they are also when ribeira paths wash out. December to February brings the bruma seca, Saharan dust that flattens the light for days and occasionally delays inter-island flights. Tap water in the towns is desalinated. Portuguese is the official language and Kriolu is the one actually spoken, in two noticeably different varieties between Santiago and São Vicente.
Shorter or longer?
Add three or four days between June and October. Cabo Verde carries one of the three largest loggerhead nesting populations in the world and most of its nests come ashore on Boa Vista. The beaches are walked at night by local conservation crews who count clutches and move the ones laid below the tide line; poaching of nesting females was heavy into the 2010s and the patrols are the reason it is not now. They take small numbers of visitors out with them, and going down to a nesting beach without one of them is an offence. Direct flights from both Praia and Sal.
Praia, Cidade Velha and Tarrafal, then fly to Mindelo and cross to Porto Novo for the Paúl descent and the coast path. Keeps the terraces, the camp and the best two walks; cuts the volcano, Brava and both of the connections most likely to go wrong.