Chã das Caldeiras

Overview

Chã das Caldeiras is an inhabited plain on the floor of the Fogo caldera, at roughly 1,700 metres, and the highest place people live in Cape Verde. It is not a viewpoint or a ruin: it is a working farming community of two villages, Portela and Bangaeira, with vineyards, goats, guesthouses and a wine cooperative, sitting inside the crater of a volcano that last erupted in the winter of 2014 to 2015.

The setting is the reason to come. The plain is enclosed by the Bordeira, the curved wall of an old collapse scar whose cliffs rise up to 1,000 metres above the caldera floor, breached on the eastern side where lava has repeatedly escaped towards the coast. The floor sits at about 1,625 metres and the caldera is roughly 9 kilometres across; out of the middle of it rises Pico do Fogo at 2,829 metres, the highest point in the country. The whole area lies inside Fogo Natural Park, created in February 2003 and covering 84.69 square kilometres, about 17.8 percent of Fogo.

Altitude does something here that happens nowhere else in Cape Verde. Reliable summer and autumn rain plus deep volcanic soil make Chã one of the most productive pieces of farmland in a semi-arid country, and the only place in the archipelago that grows grapes in quantity and bottles wine for export.

Most visitors arrive from São Filipe on the island’s only road into the caldera, sleep one night, climb the volcano at dawn and leave. The village rewards a slower version of that.

History

People have lived on the caldera floor since about the middle of the 19th century, and the two villages took their present shape in the early 20th: Bangaeira in 1917 and Portela around 1920. Cape Verde’s own nomination dossier traces the first settlement to two springs, Fonte Velha and Fonte Nova, at Boca Fonte, and explains the choice of somewhere so exposed as a trade: water and fertile soil are scarce almost everywhere else in the country.

The Montrond story

Many people in Chã have light skin, blue eyes or fair hair, and the explanation you will hear is a French one. Both Wikipedia and the Cape Verdean government’s UNESCO dossier attribute the caldera’s Montrond family to a French count, François Louis Armand Fourcheut de Montrond, said to have stopped on Fogo on his way to Brazil and stayed. Wikipedia adds that he brought the vines that started wine growing here, produced coffee for export to Portugal, sank wells still in use and died at 60 of an infected broken leg after a fall from a horse. Treat it as the community’s own account rather than settled record: the arrival date Wikipedia gives, 1670, is hard to square with the rest of the chronology, and the dossier gives no date at all. The dossier names the two founding families as Fontes and Montrond, both of whom stayed until the 1995 eruption.

1995, and the resettlement that failed

The 1995 eruption hit a caldera population of roughly 1,300 across Portela, Bangaeira and the smaller Ilhéu de Losna. Lava cut the only road within days, so people walked out by footpath to the north coast, and the flows buried more than 3 square kilometres of the best food-growing land. Afterwards the authorities moved the community and its school and health services permanently out of the caldera, to planned villages on the dry southern side of the island, which had services but no farmland. Within two years Chã was being repopulated, starting with adults who came back up to work their fields, and over the next two decades wine, farming and tourism grew into a local economy. A 2010 census counted 697 residents; by 2014 estimates ran as high as nearly 1,500.

The 2014 to 2015 eruption

The volcano started erupting shortly after 10:00 on Sunday 23 November 2014 and did not stop for 77 days, ending on 8 February 2015. It was the first eruption in 19 years and, at explosivity index 3, the largest since records began on the island.

Nobody was killed or injured. The Red Cross of Cape Verde and the United Nations office recorded 1,076 people evacuated, 838 of them moved into temporary centres and the houses built after 1995. Of roughly 350 buildings in Chã, 260 ended up in the path of the lava and about 170 were destroyed or buried outright, three quarters of the built stock of the three villages, along with a quarter of the cultivable land and the water storage. Some 5.7 kilometres of the only surfaced road went under flows up to 6 metres thick, and in a hollow a kilometre west of Portela the lava ponded 26 metres deep. Total erupted volume was around 45 million cubic metres. Damage was put at 5 to 6 billion escudos, around 45 million euros.

Rebuilding on the lava

The refusal to be resettled is the defining fact about this place, and it is documented rather than romantic. Surveyors in Chã in February 2015, eleven weeks after the flows passed, found a family already living again in a house marooned inside the lava field, reached by a track crushed through the scoria, because it beat the emergency shelter; a small hotel in Bangaeira, surrounded but not entered by lava, was preparing to reopen. Satellite images from February 2016 show new buildings going up directly on the 2014 flow surface west of Portela. A geographer who walked through Portela in November 2017 recorded guesthouses rebuilt by their owners and taking walkers again. Be clear-eyed too: the eruption emptied the caldera for a time, and how many people live here now is not something published figures answer.

Visiting

Getting in

There is one road up from São Filipe, about 40 kilometres to the east, climbing to the rim and dropping into the caldera. Understand what happened to it: the 2014 flows buried 5.7 kilometres of the surfaced road, and access to Portela and Bangaeira afterwards was by a dirt route threaded between older lava flows and the foot of the Bordeira cliffs. Whether it has since been fully re-laid across the flow is not something we could confirm from an official source, so ask in São Filipe before setting off and take a vehicle with clearance if you are driving.

Public transport is the shared minibus, the aluguer. Frequencies on Fogo are thin: the usual pattern is one run from a small village into São Filipe in the morning and back around midday, every day but Sunday, which makes a caldera day trip by aluguer awkward and an overnight the sensible plan.

What there is to see

Walking the two villages is the visit. Portela and Bangaeira sit against the wall of the 2014 to 2015 flow, in places standing at the height of a surviving roof, with houses part-swallowed and new ones built on top of the black surface. Among the older buildings are the funcos, low circular dry-stone houses of local volcanic block and thatch that the nomination dossier singles out as the traditional architecture of Chã.

Around the houses are the vineyards, planted into cinder, plus apples, quince, pomegranate, figs, peaches, tomatoes, beans, maize and potatoes. The farmers’ cooperative, the Associação dos Agricultores de Chã, buys surplus fruit and turns it into the Chã label wines, red, white, rosé and a sweet sun-dried passito, along with grape, apple and quince spirits, jams and juices, and it roasts Fogo coffee. Most households also still make manecom, the strong semi-sweet house wine that is the drink of the caldera. Goat cheese is the other thing to ask for. Buying here matters more than usual: wine was the most valuable product the community had, and the 2014 flows took the vines with everything else.

The park headquarters

The park’s headquarters stood in Chã and is now under the lava. Designed by the Lisbon practice OTO Arquitectos in black masonry block made from cement and volcanic ash, with an auditorium, open-air theatre, library and laboratories, it was inaugurated in April 2014 and destroyed seven months later; it won a national architecture prize and an international building of the year award after it had already been buried. Wikipedia records that the seat of the park then moved to Cabeça Fundão, on the park’s edge. We could not verify whether a staffed visitor centre operates inside the caldera today, and the national protected areas website was offline when we checked in September 2026, so treat guides and guesthouse owners as the working source of park information.

Walking from here

The obvious walk is the ascent of Pico do Fogo, which starts from Chã, is permitted only with a mountain guide hired in the village or through agencies in São Filipe, and normally begins at sunrise. Guided alternatives include a two-day circuit of the Bordeira ridge and the long downhill walk out to Mosteiros on the north east coast.

Botanically this is the richest ground on the island. Of Fogo’s 31 endemic plant species, 84 percent grow in Chã and on the Bordeira, and several, including Echium vulcanorum and Erysimum caboverdeanum, are found nowhere else on Earth. The 2014 flows killed many of the endemics in Chã itself, so much of what survives is now on the cliffs and higher ground.

Tips

Dress for a mountain, not an island

Chã is the coldest inhabited place in Cape Verde: annual mean around 13.5 degrees, average highs between about 15 and 19, average lows between 8 and 12, and frost recorded in winter. A warm layer and a windproof are not optional if you are sleeping here, and you will want them again on the summit before dawn.

Time your visit around the rain

Rainfall averages about 524 millimetres a year, high by Cape Verdean standards and the reason the vines grow, and it is concentrated: roughly 151 millimetres in August and 198 in September, against nothing at all in April and May. Late autumn through spring is the drier window for walking, at the cost of colder nights.

Practicalities in the caldera

Guesthouse meals are home cooking, and the produce is local by necessity rather than fashion. Ordering the cooperative’s wine with dinner, and carrying a bottle out, is the most direct way to leave money where it does most good.

Respect that this is somebody’s village

The half-buried houses you are photographing are the homes people lost, and in several cases the ones they moved back into. Ask before pointing a camera into a doorway or a yard, and hire guides in the village rather than bringing one up from the coast.

Volcano awareness

Pico do Fogo is active. Cape Verde’s own dossier puts the average interval between eruptions at about 19 years, and the last ended in February 2015. Monitoring and the alert level scheme are run by the national meteorology and geophysics institute, and in 2014 the system worked: levels were raised in advance and everyone got out. Check current status with your guide or guesthouse; up here, they hear first.