Cape Verde

Overview

Cape Verde is an island republic of ten volcanic islands in the Atlantic Ocean, around 450 km off the coast of West Africa. Nine of the islands are inhabited, and each has its own character: the flat, sandy east holds the package resorts, the mountainous west holds some of the best walking in the Atlantic, and the two biggest towns carry a musical culture that reached the world through the voice of Cesária Évora. The country counted 491,233 residents at the 2021 census, while a diaspora spread across the United States, Portugal and beyond considerably outnumbers the population at home.

The islands were uninhabited until Portuguese settlers arrived in 1462, and the mix that followed, of African and European people, food and language, produced a distinct Creole society. Portuguese is the official language, but everyday life runs in Kriolu, and independence arrived only on 5 July 1975. Morna, the slow, melancholic national song form, was inscribed by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2019.

Most visitors see only one island. The vast majority fly into Sal or Boa Vista for a beach week and stay put, which is why those two islands, with their white sand and all-inclusive hotels, dominate the tourism statistics. The country rewards more effort. Santo Antão is a serious hiking destination of clifftop paths and terraced valleys, Fogo is an active volcano you can climb, Santiago holds the capital and the oldest colonial town in the tropics, and São Vicente has Mindelo, the country’s cultural capital.

Tourism has become the engine of the economy. Arrivals grew from around 45,000 in 1997 to over 765,000 in 2018, with the United Kingdom, Germany and Portugal the biggest source markets, and the hotel industry’s share of GDP climbing from 2 percent in 1997 to an estimated 25 to 30 percent.

Travel between islands takes planning. Domestic flights have changed operator repeatedly and ferries do not always run to time, so a multi-island trip needs slack built into it. Accept that, and Cape Verde offers something rare: a safe, compact African island nation where beach, volcano and live music are each a short hop apart.

Regions

Cape Verde’s nine inhabited islands are its regions, and the differences between them are the whole point of travelling here. They split into the windward Barlavento chain in the north and the leeward Sotavento chain in the south.

Barlavento, the windward islands

Santo Antão is the second largest island at 785 square kilometres and the country’s hiking capital, a mass of gorges and knife-edge ridges where paths link villages such as Fontainhas along the cliffs. The Paul valley and the crater of Cova de Paul hold its greenest terraces, and the island grows the sugarcane behind grogue, the national spirit. It has no passenger airport, so everyone arrives by ferry from Mindelo.

São Vicente is nearly all about Mindelo, the port on Porto Grande Bay that is considered the cultural capital of the country, with Monte Verde rising behind it. Uninhabited Santa Luzia lies just offshore. São Nicolau is a quieter, mountainous island of farming villages, with walking around Monte Gordo Natural Park and few tourists.

Sal is flat, dry and built for the beach, with an average of 350 days of sunshine a year, the resort town of Santa Maria at its southern tip, salt pans at Pedra de Lume, the lava pools of Buracona and a serious windsurfing and kitesurfing scene at spots such as Ponta Preta. Boa Vista offers the same formula with more sand and less town: dunes in the Deserto de Viana, the long empty sweep of Praia de Santa Mónica, the rusting Cabo Santa Maria shipwreck and the small capital Sal Rei. Together with Maio, these flat islands receive the vast majority of Cape Verde’s tourists.

Sotavento, the leeward islands

Santiago is where Cape Verde began and where most Cape Verdeans live, with the capital Praia, the UNESCO-listed streets of Cidade Velha, the mountains of Serra Malagueta and the beach town of Tarrafal in the north. Fogo is a single volcano rising from the sea: Pico do Fogo at 2,829 metres towers over the crater villages of Chã das Caldeiras, where vines and coffee grow in volcanic soil, and the Portuguese town of São Filipe sits on the coast.

Brava, reached only by ferry from Fogo or Santiago, is the smallest and mistiest of the inhabited islands, with the harbour hamlet of Fajã d’Água and old emigration ties to New England whaling. Maio, a short crossing from Praia, is the quietest of the flat islands, with salt pans at the Salinas do Porto Inglês and almost no development.

Major cities

Cape Verde is not an urban destination, but its two main cities are essential to understanding the country, and a handful of small towns serve as bases for each island.

Praia

Praia, on Santiago, is the capital and largest city, built around a clifftop core called the Plateau above a working port. It is the seat of government, home of the main international airport on the southern islands and the place to feel everyday, non-touristic Cape Verde. The country’s largest hospitals are here and in Mindelo. Fifteen minutes west, Cidade Velha preserves the fortress, churches and pillory square of the first European colonial town in the tropics.

Mindelo

Mindelo on São Vicente counted around 70,000 residents at the 2010 census and is the country’s second city and its cultural heart. It grew as a 19th century coaling station for British shipping lines on the Porto Grande natural harbour, and that cosmopolitan port history still shows in its architecture, its bars and its music. Cesária Évora was born here, Carnival peaks here, and the August Baía das Gatas festival happens on this island.

Island towns

Elsewhere the settlements are small. Santa Maria on Sal is the tourism capital in practice, a former salt port turned resort town on a long white beach; Espargos, by the airport, is Sal’s administrative centre. Sal Rei plays the same role on Boa Vista at a smaller scale. São Filipe, the main town of Fogo, keeps streets of Portuguese colonial houses above a black sand shore. On Santo Antão, the ferry port of Porto Novo is the island’s largest settlement, while Ponta do Sol and Ribeira Grande on the green north coast are the favoured hiking bases. Tarrafal, at Santiago’s northern tip, pairs a palm-backed bay with the sobering museum of the former Tarrafal camp.

Geography & landscape

Cape Verde sits in the mid Atlantic, roughly 450 km west of Senegal. The archipelago covers 4,033 square kilometres of land spread across ten islands and several islets, with 965 km of coastline and an exclusive economic zone of over 800,000 square kilometres of ocean.

Two island groups

The islands divide into two groups named for the trade winds. The Barlavento (windward) islands in the north are Santo Antão, São Vicente, Santa Luzia, São Nicolau, Sal and Boa Vista. The Sotavento (leeward) islands in the south are Maio, Santiago, Fogo and Brava. Santa Luzia, at 34 square kilometres, is the only uninhabited island of the ten.

Volcanic origins

All the islands are volcanic, but erosion and age have treated them very differently. The eastern islands, Sal, Boa Vista and Maio, are old, worn flat and fringed with sand; Sal’s highest point, Monte Grande, reaches just 406 metres. The western islands are young and steep. Pico do Fogo, the country’s highest point at 2,829 metres, is an active volcano that last erupted in 2014 to 2015, and Santo Antão’s Tope de Coroa rises to 1,979 metres above deep gorges cut by seasonal rivers.

This split shapes everything a visitor experiences. Rainfall is scarce everywhere, but the mountainous islands catch substantially more moisture on their northeastern slopes above 600 metres, which is why Santo Antão has terraced sugarcane valleys while Boa Vista has dunes.

The distances are real: island hopping means flights or ferry crossings of anything from forty minutes to half a day, so treat the archipelago as a small country rather than a single destination.

Climate

Cape Verde sits at the ocean end of the Sahel, and its climate is the Sahel’s made mild by the sea: warm all year, dry most of the year, with a short and unreliable rainy season.

The numbers

Open-Meteo ERA5 normals for 1991 to 2020, taken at a mid-archipelago reference point, show an unusually narrow range. Daily maxima run at 21.8 to 22.6°C from February through May, climb through 24.6°C in July to a peak of 26.7°C in September, then ease back to 23.7°C by December, and night temperatures at sea level stay within a degree or two of the daytime figures. Rain is concentrated almost entirely in August to October: September is the wettest month at around 41 mm, August brings about 21 mm and October about 16 mm, while from December to July monthly totals are typically under 5 mm and often near zero.

Those are open-ocean figures, and the islands themselves diverge from them. The flat eastern islands stay arid, while northeastern mountain slopes above 600 metres catch cloud and rain, and if rain comes at all it usually falls between August and October. Failed rains have historically meant drought, and drought once meant famine.

Wind and dust

The northeast trade winds blow through the cooler months and give the windward islands their name, feeding the wind sports season on Sal and Boa Vista. Between November and March, the harmattan sometimes carries Saharan dust across the islands, hazing the sky for days at a time and occasionally disrupting flights; locals treat it as a normal part of winter.

For most visitors the practical reading is simple: November to June is dry, breezy and reliably warm; August to October is hotter, more humid and greener, which is the best time to see Santo Antão and Santiago at their most alive, at the price of occasional downpours.

Food & drink

Cape Verdean food is simple, filling and built on what the islands and the surrounding ocean provide: maize, beans, tubers, pork, goat and a great deal of fish.

Cachupa

The national dish is cachupa, a slow-cooked stew of hominy corn and beans with fish or meat, anything from sausage and pork to goat or chicken, sometimes with morcela, the local blood sausage, and each island has its own version. Cachupa rica is the loaded festive version; cachupa pobre the leaner everyday one. Yesterday’s pot, refried as cachupa guisada or refogada, is the classic Cape Verdean breakfast, often topped with a fried egg, linguiça sausage or fried mackerel.

Beyond cachupa, the ocean does most of the work: grilled fish and seafood anchor menus across the islands, with resort areas adding Italian and international standards. Portions are generous and prices modest outside the hotel zones.

What to drink

Grogue, a rum distilled from sugarcane grown in the valleys of Santo Antão, is the national spirit, drunk neat or sweetened with honey and lime as ponche. Fogo grows wine and coffee in the volcanic soil of Chã das Caldeiras, with local wines sold under the Chã label, and the everyday beer across the islands is Strela.

Tap water is not the norm for visitors; stick to bottled or treated water, especially outside the main towns.

Culture & society

Cape Verdean culture is Creole in the full sense: African and Portuguese elements fused over five centuries into something that belongs to neither continent. Music is its clearest expression, and the emigration that scattered families across the ocean is its constant theme.

Morna and sodade

Morna is the national song form: slow, in a two-beat bar, sung in Kriolu over guitar, cavaquinho, violin and piano, with lyrics about love, departure, return and the sea. Oral tradition places its origins on Boa Vista in the 18th century. The poet Eugénio Tavares gave it its romantic character, the composer B.Leza enriched its harmony in the 1930s and 1940s, and UNESCO proclaimed morna Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity on 11 December 2019. Its emotional core is sodade, the Kriolu word for the ache of separation and longing.

Cesária Évora, born in Mindelo in 1941, carried morna to concert halls worldwide and remains its best known voice; São Vicente’s international airport now bears her name.

Festivals

Mindelo stages the country’s biggest Carnival, a pre-Lenten parade season with Brazilian-influenced costumes and floats built on Portuguese roots, and every August the Festival de Baía das Gatas brings open-air music to a bay east of the city on São Vicente.

A nation abroad

Emigration shapes daily life as much as any festival. The diaspora, concentrated in the United States and Portugal, considerably outnumbers the resident population, and remittances, return visits and transatlantic family ties are woven into the economy and the music alike.

History

Cape Verde had no indigenous population. Portuguese explorers reached the islands around 1456, and in 1462 settlers founded Ribeira Grande on Santiago, the first permanent European settlement in the tropics.

Slavery and the Atlantic trade

The islands’ position made them a hub of the Atlantic slave trade. Santiago prospered in the 16th century as a transit point for enslaved people, with sugar and cotton plantations on Santiago and Fogo, and that wealth drew raiders: Sir Francis Drake sacked Ribeira Grande in the 1580s. The town, later renamed Cidade Velha, was inscribed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 2009, with a royal fortress, two churches and a 16th century marble pillory that survive from that era.

Drought, famine and emigration

The islands’ dry climate wrote the darkest chapters. Three major droughts in the 18th and 19th centuries killed well over 100,000 people, and famines in 1941 to 1943 and 1947 to 1948 killed an estimated 45,000 more while the Portuguese authorities suppressed reporting. Hunger drove emigration: from the late 17th century, whaling ships from Massachusetts and Rhode Island recruited crews from Brava and Fogo, planting the large Cape Verdean community that still lives in New England.

From prison camp to independence

Under Portugal’s Estado Novo dictatorship, the Tarrafal camp opened in 1936 near Tarrafal on Santiago, holding first Portuguese anti-fascists and later African independence fighters; it closed in May 1974, days after the Carnation Revolution, and is now the Museum of Resistance. In 1956 Amílcar Cabral, born to Cape Verdean parents, founded the PAIGC, which fought Portuguese rule in Guinea-Bissau and the islands. Cape Verde became independent on 5 July 1975. A 1980 coup in Guinea-Bissau ended plans for union between the two countries, and after sixteen years of one-party rule the country held its first multi-party elections in 1991. It has been a stable parliamentary democracy since.

Nature

Cape Verde’s nature is oceanic and volcanic rather than lush. The land is dry for most of the year, but the contrasts pack a punch: dune fields, lava plains, cloud-catching peaks and a vast surrounding sea.

Mountains and craters

The high islands hold the country’s protected mountain landscapes. On Santiago, the ridges of Serra Malagueta Natural Park rise above the island’s farming valleys; on São Nicolau, Monte Gordo Natural Park protects the island’s highest slopes. Santo Antão concentrates the drama, with gorges and terraces on its wet northeastern side where slopes above 600 metres catch substantially more rain than the coasts. Fogo is the centrepiece: an active volcano with recorded eruptions in 1680, 1725, 1857, 1951, 1995 and 2014 to 2015, the last of which buried parts of Portela and Bangaeira, the villages inside the crater of Chã das Caldeiras, where people returned to replant vines in the lava.

Desert and coast

The eastern islands feel Saharan. Boa Vista has genuine dune fields in the Deserto de Viana and tens of kilometres of empty strand such as Praia de Santa Mónica, while Maio keeps working salt pans at the Salinas do Porto Inglês. On Sal, seawater fills an old volcanic crater at Pedra de Lume, and the sea has carved swimming holes into the lava at Buracona.

The ocean

The state is mostly water: an exclusive economic zone of 800,561 square kilometres, warmer than the upwelling-cooled seas off mainland West Africa, with the uninhabited island of Santa Luzia and its islets left to seabirds. The constant trade wind swell that batters the northern coasts also powers the surfing, windsurfing and kitesurfing scene that has grown around Sal over recent decades.

Getting there

Cape Verde has four international airports, and which one you use largely decides which country you experience.

The four airports

Amílcar Cabral International Airport (SID) on Sal, 2 km from Espargos, is the busiest in the country and the main charter hub, handling nearly 1.2 million passengers in 2019. TUI Airways flies there from six UK airports: London Gatwick, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Glasgow and Newcastle. easyJet flies from Gatwick, Bristol, Manchester, Milan, Lisbon and Porto, Transavia from six French cities including Paris Orly, and TAP Air Portugal and Cabo Verde Airlines serve it from Lisbon, with more routes added seasonally.

Nelson Mandela International Airport (RAI) at Praia, opened in 2005, serves the capital with TAP flights from Lisbon and Porto, Cabo Verde Airlines to Lisbon, Paris, Providence and Recife, Royal Air Maroc from Casablanca and Air Senegal from Dakar, which makes it the natural entry point for combining the southern islands or continuing to and from West Africa, Brazil and New England. Aristides Pereira (BVC) on Boa Vista handles that island’s charter traffic, and Cesária Évora Airport (VXE) on São Vicente connects Mindelo internationally.

Route maps shift with the seasons, and several connections noted here were listed as starting or seasonal in late 2026, so check current schedules directly with airlines before locking in plans. Before departure, remember that Cape Verde requires airport pre-registration through the official EASE platform; the details are in the visas section of this guide.

Getting around

Moving between islands is the crux of any multi-island trip, and honesty helps here more than optimism: Cape Verde’s domestic transport works, but rarely to the minute, and its aviation history is turbulent.

Inter-island flights

Domestic flying has changed hands repeatedly. The national carrier TACV gave up domestic routes in 2017, the Bestfly group and its TICV operation took over, then suspended ticket sales in March 2024 when its two ATR 72-600s went into maintenance, and cancelled all flights from 19 April 2024; its website still carries those notices. As of mid 2026, Cabo Verde Airlines is listed as flying domestic routes to Sal, Praia, Boa Vista, São Vicente, São Nicolau and Maio. Verify who is flying, and book directly with the current operator, before you build an itinerary around a domestic flight.

Ferries

CV Interilhas, part of Portugal’s Grupo ETE, runs the inter-island ferry network serving all nine inhabited islands, with online booking and payment on its website and an office in Praia; it can also carry vehicles and cargo. From its September 2026 timetable: the vessel Chiquinho BL shuttles between São Vicente and Santo Antão in about an hour, with several crossings a day in each direction; the Liberdadi links Santiago and Maio in about two hours, twice a day on sailing days; and the Dona Tututa works a northern line from São Vicente to São Nicolau and on to Sal and Boa Vista.

The operator’s own duration table gives a fair sense of scale: Santiago to Fogo is listed at just over five hours, Fogo to Brava at fifty minutes, Sal to Boa Vista at around three hours, and São Vicente to São Nicolau at under four, while a Santiago to Santo Antão journey stretches past fourteen. Not every route runs every day, so check the current schedule on the operator’s site when planning.

Treat every departure as provisional. As Wikivoyage puts it, timetables in Cape Verde are not to be taken too seriously: boats can leave ahead of schedule and flights can slip to the next day, so keep a buffer of at least a full day before any international flight. Note that Brava and Santo Antão have no working airports at all, so the ferry is the only way in.

On each island

The workhorse of local transport is the aluguer, a shared minibus or pickup, typically a Toyota Hiace van or a Hilux with bench seats, that runs fixed routes between towns for fixed, low fares. They leave when full, you flag them down anywhere along the route, and you call out to stop. Taxis and hire cars exist in the main towns; drive carefully, as the UK government warns that intercity minibus travel can be dangerous because of poor driving, and helmets are legally required on scooters and quad bikes.

Where to stay

Where you stay in Cape Verde depends almost entirely on which island you choose, because the accommodation stock splits into two different worlds.

Resorts on the sand

On Sal and Boa Vista, large all-inclusive beach resorts dominate, including complexes run by international chains such as Riu, aimed at the UK, German and Portuguese charter markets that make up the biggest visitor groups. Santa Maria also keeps a core of independent hotels, apartments and surf lodges in the town itself, which suits travellers who want restaurants and nightlife within walking distance rather than a gated compound.

Guesthouses everywhere else

Across the rest of the archipelago the standard is the pensão or residencial, a small family-run guesthouse, alongside a growing number of boutique hotels in Mindelo and São Filipe and simple rural lodgings in the valleys of Santo Antão, where hikers base themselves in villages such as Ponta do Sol or in the Paul valley. Hotels and guesthouses exist throughout the islands, but inventory on the quieter ones, Brava, Maio and São Nicolau, is small, so book ahead rather than turning up.

Demand peaks matter more than seasons on the culture islands: beds in Mindelo fill around Carnival and the August Baía das Gatas festival, both fixtures of the São Vicente calendar. In Chã das Caldeiras on Fogo, villagers rebuilt guest lodging inside the crater after the 2014 to 2015 eruption, and staying there before a dawn climb of Pico do Fogo is one of the country’s most distinctive nights.

Visas & entry

Entry to Cape Verde is straightforward for most visitors, but it involves an online step that catches people out, and the rules have been changing, so check official sources close to travel.

Who needs a visa

Citizens of all EU member states, the UK, the US, Canada, Brazil, Norway, Switzerland and several other countries can enter visa-free for up to 30 days; ECOWAS nationals and a few others get 90 days. The regime tightened on 1 January 2026, when Cape Verde ended visa-on-arrival for nationals of a long list of countries, mostly in Africa, Asia and Latin America, who must now obtain a visa from an embassy before arrival, including for transit.

EASE pre-registration and the airport tax

All arriving travellers should register on the government’s EASE platform (ease.gov.cv) before flying, at least 5 days before arrival according to UK government advice, and pay the airport security tax (TSA) of 3,400 CVE there. Children aged one and under are exempt. The incentive to comply has teeth: from 1 July 2026, travellers who cannot show proof of pre-registration pay double the TSA at border control.

UK advice is that passports should be valid for at least 6 months from the date of arrival; other nationalities should confirm their own government’s guidance. Rules here change often enough that a five-minute check of ease.gov.cv and your foreign ministry’s advice before booking is genuinely worth it.

Money & budget

Cape Verde’s currency is the escudo (CVE). A 1998 agreement with Portugal first pegged it to the Portuguese escudo, and since the euro replaced that currency the peg has carried over at a fixed 110.265 escudos per euro, so exchange rate maths is stable: 1,000 CVE is a little over 9 EUR, and 100 EUR is just over 11,000 CVE. Banknotes circulate in 200, 500, 1,000, 2,000 and 5,000 escudo denominations, with coins from 5 to 100 escudos.

Cards, cash and euros

ATMs in the main towns accept Visa, Mastercard and Maestro, and credit cards are taken at larger hotels, but much of the everyday economy runs on cash: expect to pay aluguer drivers, market stalls and small restaurants in escudos. On the resort islands of Sal and Boa Vista, euros are commonly accepted, and many tour operators and hotels quote prices in euros in the first place; change comes back in escudos at rates that favour the seller, so paying small amounts in local currency is usually better value.

Government fees are a separate wrinkle: the airport security tax charged to arriving international passengers is set in escudos (3,400 CVE) but paid online through the EASE platform, usually by card, before travel.

Languages

Portuguese is the official language of Cape Verde, used in government, schools, newspapers and formal signage. The language of homes, streets and song, though, is Cape Verdean Creole, known to its speakers as Kriolu.

Kriolu is a Portuguese-based creole and a linguistic landmark: it is the oldest living creole language and the most widely spoken Portuguese-based creole in the world, native to virtually all Cape Verdeans and spoken as a heritage language across the diaspora, with around 871,000 native speakers counted in 2017, more than the resident population thanks to emigrant communities. It is not uniform. The Sotavento islands speak southern variants, including the badiu speech of Santiago, while the Barlavento islands speak northern variants such as the kriol of São Vicente, and islanders enjoy the differences. Government resolutions in 2005 and 2015 prepared the ground for making Kriolu official alongside Portuguese, but standardisation across dialects has not yet been settled and officialisation has not happened.

For visitors, Portuguese works everywhere, and any Portuguese you have from Brazil or Portugal will be understood. In the resort areas of Sal and Boa Vista tourism staff commonly work in English, French, German and Italian as well, a reflection of where the charter flights come from. A few Kriolu words go a long way in goodwill: obrigadu (thank you), morabeza (the local word for warm hospitality) and sodade you will meet in every song.

Safety & health

Cape Verde is one of the safer countries in the region to visit. The UK government describes the crime rate as generally low, with the caveats that pickpocketing, bag snatching, burglary and muggings do occur, particularly in Praia and on the islands of Sal and Boa Vista, where tourists concentrate.

The precautions are the usual ones: leave valuables in the hotel safe, avoid carrying large amounts of cash or conspicuous jewellery, stay out of unlit and isolated areas after dark, and be wary on empty stretches of beach with limited visibility.

The ocean is the real hazard

The sea deserves more respect than the streets. Tides and currents around the islands are very strong, waves can be unpredictable with a powerful undertow, and even walking close to the water’s edge on unsupervised beaches has caught people out. Swim only at beaches with lifeguards and obey the flag system: red means danger, yellow caution, green safe.

On the roads, the main risks are poor driving and rough surfaces. UK advice flags intercity minibus services as dangerous because of driving standards, and helmets are legally required on scooters and quad bikes. Hikers on Santo Antão and Fogo should treat the terrain seriously: paths are exposed, rescue infrastructure is thin, and medical evacuation from islands without working airports is genuinely difficult.

Practical info

A few practical basics smooth out a Cape Verde trip considerably.

Health

Cape Verde was certified malaria-free by the World Health Organization in 2024, a milestone for the region. Medical facilities are basic and limited, with the largest hospitals in Praia and Mindelo and little elsewhere; some medicines run short, UK GHIC cards are not accepted, and comprehensive travel insurance with medical evacuation cover is essential. The government has at times raised dengue warnings on Santiago, Fogo and Brava, so pack mosquito repellent, and note that altitude sickness is a risk when climbing Pico do Fogo. Check vaccination recommendations about 8 weeks before travel.

Connectivity and power

Mobile coverage comes from two operators, CVMóvel and Unitel T+, and prepaid tourist SIMs with several gigabytes of data are cheap and sold in the main towns. Electricity is 220 volts at 50 Hz with European two-pin sockets (Europlug and Schuko), so UK visitors need an adapter and continental Europeans do not.

Time and rhythm

Cape Verde runs on its own time zone, one hour behind UTC with no summer time, which puts it an hour behind the UK in winter and two hours behind in summer. The practical rhythm of the country is unhurried: shops close for lunch, ferries and flights slip, and the local concept of morabeza, unforced hospitality, does more for a stranded traveller than any timetable. Build slack into plans, carry escudos on the quiet islands, reconfirm every ferry and flight a day ahead with the operator, and the archipelago is an easy, welcoming place to travel.