Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Praia
Population: 490,000+
Language: Portuguese, Cape Verdean Creole
1 – Santa Maria (also above)
Santa Maria, a sun-baked resort town on the long white-sand beach at the southern tip of Sal, was founded in the early 19th century to export salt, the “white gold” that gave the island its name, and the Morabeza, among the islands’ first hotels, opened here in 1967.
Life revolves around the beach and Santa Maria’s pier, where fishermen land their catch, while steady trade winds draw kitesurfers and windsurfers, with boats heading out in season to look for humpback whales and nesting loggerhead turtles.
At nearby Pedra de Lume you can wade into a salt lake inside an extinct volcanic crater, where the brine is so dense that you float effortlessly, much like in the Dead Sea, and salt from here was once shipped to Brazil.
2 – São Vicente & Mindelo
São Vicente, a dry, mountainous island left almost empty for centuries after its discovery in 1462, came alive in 1838 when its harbour at Porto Grande became a coal depot for Atlantic steamships, and in September 1941 a British submarine attacked three U-boats refuelling across the channel in Tarrafal Bay, off neighbouring Santo Antão.
Mindelo, Cape Verde’s cultural capital, has a pastel waterfront, a 1920s replica of Lisbon’s Belém Tower that houses the Museu do Mar, and a riotous pre-Lent Carnival, while August brings the Baía das Gatas music festival and Monte Verde gives views across the island.
Mindelo is a heartland of morna, Cape Verde’s soulful national music, and the hometown of Cesária Évora, the “Barefoot Diva” who sang her way from Mindelo’s bars to a Grammy in 2004.
3 – Pico do Fogo
Pico do Fogo, the “Peak of Fire”, rises to 2,829 m as Cape Verde’s highest point, an active volcano whose near-perfect cone dominates the island of Fogo, and about 73,000 years ago the collapse of its flank set off one of the largest known volcanic megatsunamis.
The volcano erupts every few decades, and in 2014–15 lava largely destroyed two villages, and climbers set out up the black cone from Chã das Caldeiras, a village of a few hundred people inside the caldera at about 1,700 m, ringed by the sheer wall of the Bordeira.
Chã das Caldeiras is Cape Verde’s only significant wine region, with vines rooted in the volcanic ash, and many of its people claim descent from a 19th-century French count, Armand de Montrond, often credited with bringing the first vines.
4 – Cidade Velha
Cidade Velha, 10–15 km west of Praia on Santiago, was founded in 1462 as Ribeira Grande, the first European colonial town built in the tropics, and a royal charter of 1466 let its settlers trade on the Guinea coast, including in enslaved Africans, before UNESCO listed it in 2009.
An ornate early-16th-century marble pillory, where rebellious enslaved people were publicly punished, stands near the church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário, built around 1495, the ruined cathedral wrecked in a French raid of 1712, and Fort Real de São Filipe, built in 1587–93 after Francis Drake sacked the town.
It was in Cidade Velha’s valley, where Portuguese and West African languages met, that Cape Verdean Creole took shape, widely regarded as one of the oldest living creole languages.
5 – Tarrafal
The Tarrafal camp, at Chão Bom on the north coast of Santiago, was created by decree in 1936 under Salazar’s Estado Novo to hold political prisoners, among them communists, anarcho-syndicalists and sailors from the 1936 naval revolt, who called it “o campo da morte lenta”, the camp of slow death.
The compound is the Museu da Resistência, where the cell blocks survive alongside the frigideira, or “frying pan”, a concrete punishment cell where temperatures reached about 60 °C.
The camp closed in 1954, reopened in 1961 for anti-colonial prisoners from Angola, Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde, and was emptied on 1 May 1974, six days after the Carnation Revolution, by which time around 36 prisoners had died there.