Maio

Overview

Maio is the flattest and least visited of Cape Verde’s inhabited islands, a low, dry place of long empty beaches roughly 25 km east of Santiago. The municipality puts it at 269 km², about 24 km by 16 km, with a single parish, Nossa Senhora da Luz, and one town of any size, Porto Inglês, also called Vila do Maio or Cidade do Maio. The Instituto Nacional de Estatística gives a slightly larger area of 274.5 km² and recorded 6,952 residents at the 2010 census, a figure that has barely moved since.

Two things define the island. The first is emptiness: the population is spread across a dozen villages, the highest ground is Monte Penoso at 436 m, and long stretches of coast have no buildings on them at all. The second is access. Maio has a domestic airstrip with almost no scheduled traffic and a ferry from Praia that runs about three days a week, so it absorbs very few of the visitors who fill Sal and Boa Vista.

What Maio does have is conservation status: UNESCO recognised the island as a Biosphere Reserve in 2020, and it holds seven protected areas and one of the world’s larger loggerhead turtle nesting colonies.

Two or three nights is the usual visit: a day around Porto Inglês and its salt pans, a day on the beaches or in the north, and an evening with whatever is being celebrated.

History & character

The island was sighted in 1460 and takes its name from the date, 1 May. Permanent settlement came only at the end of the 16th century, after the land had been used for grazing, especially goats. What turned Maio from a livestock station into a populated island was salt. The municipality’s own history dates the export trade from the salt pans to the 17th century, with shipments going as far as Brazil and continuing into the 19th century.

English ships loaded that salt, which is where the main town got its name: Porto Inglês, the English port. The trade also attracted trouble. An 18th-century fort, the Forte de São José, was built beside the town against pirate raids, and in January 1814 a British and a French frigate squadron fought an inconclusive action offshore in the closing stages of the Napoleonic Wars.

The character that survives all this is unhurried and small-scale. Portuguese is the official language, but daily life happens in Cape Verdean Creole, and Maio has its own recognised local variant of it. Catholic saints’ days structure the year, community by community, and the island’s own foundation charity works on the principle of djunta mon, hands joined together.

See & do

The single most rewarding half day is in and around Porto Inglês. The Salinas do Porto Inglês, the salt pans that built the town, are a protected landscape with an interpretation centre open 09:00 to 17:00. The Forte de São José and its lighthouse, the old sobrado townhouse and the parish church of Nossa Senhora da Luz, opened in 1872, are all within walking distance of each other and free to visit.

Beyond the town the attractions are landscape rather than monuments:

• Parque Natural do Norte do Maio, the northern park, taking in the dunes at Morrinho and Praia Real.
• Reserva Natural das Casas Velhas, immediately south of Porto Inglês.
• Monte Penoso, the 436 m high point in the centre of the island, open access and a walk rather than a climb.
• Beaches, including Praiona and Ribeira de São João, which the ferry operator itself calls deserted.

Between June and October the other reason to be here is turtles. Teams patrol the nesting beaches every night through the season, and the work is licensed by the national environment directorate, so this is something to do with organised monitors rather than by wandering a dark beach on your own.

Do not expect an excursion industry: the pleasures here are swimming, walking and afternoons nobody hurries.

Towns & cities

Porto Inglês holds most of the island’s services and about 2,971 people at the 2010 census, up from 1,573 in 1990. It is the seat of the municipality, the ferry port and the place where the banks, the health centre and the secondary school are, with the fort and the salt pans at its edges and the airstrip a short distance north.

Two smaller places carry the status of vila. Calheta, on the north-east coast, is the second largest settlement and lives from fishing; the planted forest begins beside it. Barreiro, split between Lém Varela and Banda Riba, sits inland to the north-west.

The rest of the island is villages, ten of them by the municipality’s count: Morro, Morrinho, Cascabulho, Praia Gonçalo, Santo António, Pedro Vaz, Alcatraz, Pilão Cão, Ribeira Dom João and Figueira, the last two of which are each really a pair of hamlets. Each has its own saint’s day, which is when the village fills up and everyone else on the island turns up too.

Food & drink

Maio eats what it catches and what it grazes. The municipality names caldo de peixe, fish broth, as the island speciality, with tuna steak, lobster and other shellfish also standard, and on the meat side tchassina, salted goat, served with cachupa, plus feijoadas and kid stew with xerém.

Moray eel deserves its own line: the island holds a gastronomy festival dedicated to it in August.

Practically, eating out means a handful of places in Porto Inglês and very little outside it: the Maio Biodiversity Foundation’s visitor page lists six restaurants for the whole island. Menus depend on the boats and on what the ferry brought, so ask what is available rather than ordering from a card, and if you are staying outside town, arrange meals with your accommodation in advance.

Nature

For an island this dry, Maio is unusually well protected. Seven protected areas were confirmed in the 2014 revision, in three categories: the Parque Natural do Norte do Maio; the nature reserves of Casas Velhas, Lagoa Cimidor and Praia do Morro; and the protected landscapes of the Salinas do Porto Inglês and of Barreiro and Figueira. The Maio Biodiversity Foundation counts the same seven, five of them marine. National statistics put 28% of the island inside protected areas and 20% under forest.

That forest is not natural. The municipality describes a planted block of about 3,500 hectares beside Calheta, mainly acacias from a reforestation programme, and calls it the largest forest perimeter in the country. Tree cover here is a working question rather than a settled achievement: the foundation’s protected areas programme removes the invasive Prosopis juliflora, runs community nurseries and replants native and endemic species, monitoring 120 native and endemic plants, 30 bird species and two terrestrial reptiles as indicators of how the areas are being managed.

The headline species is the loggerhead, Caretta caretta. The foundation describes Maio, with Sal, as holding Cape Verde’s second largest nesting colony and one of the largest in the world, protected by nightly patrols from June to October, nest relocation where erosion or predation threatens, and hatchling counts afterwards. Its cumulative totals to date are 23,221 nests recorded and a 61.17% hatch rate in its incubation nursery. A parallel programme created in 2016 has 20 local fishers monitoring marine megafauna and illegal fishing. Between the dunes at Morrinho, the Lagoa Cimidor wetland and the salt-tolerant vegetation of the salinas, the island holds a lot of habitats in a small, flat space.

Climate

Maio’s climate is hot, dry and strikingly even. Using ERA5 1991 to 2020 monthly normals for the island, average daily highs range only from 23.0 °C in February to 27.5 °C in September, and average lows from 20.1 °C in March to 24.9 °C in September. The gap between the coolest and warmest month is under five degrees.

Rainfall is the real variable, and there is little of it: the monthly normals add up to roughly 141 mm a year, of which September takes 55.5 mm, August 41.8 mm and October 26.1 mm. Every month from November to July averages under 5 mm.

Wind is the factor those numbers hide. The municipality attributes the bare, desertified look of the northern third of the island to erosion by strong north-westerly winds off the sea, and the trade winds keep the coast breezy even when the air is warm.

When to go

Maio is comfortable all year, so the calendar matters more than the weather. Two dates stand out: the festival of Santa Cruz on 3 May, and the island’s patron saint’s day, Nossa Senhora da Luz, on 8 September in Porto Inglês, which is the busiest weekend of the year. August brings the moray gastronomy festival and September a music festival, and every month a different community holds its own saint’s celebration. The municipality’s list of village feast days runs from Nossa Senhora do Socorro at Cascabulho on 6 January through São José at Calheta on 19 March and São Pedro at Pedro Vaz on 29 June to Cristo Rei at Figueira on 24 November, with Carnival before Lent.

June to October is turtle season and the only wet part of the year: August to October carry almost all of the island’s rain, which here still means very little, and are the warmest and most humid months.

For the island at its emptiest, come between January and May: dry, breezy and nobody about.

Getting there

Maio is reached from Santiago, and access is the island’s central practical problem. There is no international airport and no direct link from any other island.

By ferry. CV Interilhas runs the Sotavento line, on which one vessel alternates between the Praia to Maio run and the Praia to Fogo and Brava run. On the published timetable the Maio legs leave Santiago at 10:00 and 17:00, with returns from Maio at 13:00 and 20:00, and the operator’s own duration table gives Santiago to Maio as 1 hour 45 minutes. The Maio Biodiversity Foundation tells visitors the boat runs on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays and the inter-island flights on Mondays and Saturdays. The published Sotavento timetable names the Kriola as the vessel, though on 4 September 2026 the live departures board showed the Liberdadi working the Maio rotations instead, which is a fair illustration of how much can change.

Fares are set by government order and are low: the tariff in force since 1 February 2024 prices Santiago to Maio at 1,530 CVE for nationals and 2,300 CVE for non-nationals, taxes included. Tickets are sold online and at the operator’s counters.

Sailings do get cancelled: in January 2026 the operator suspended three days of its northern line after the national meteorological institute forecast swell of 2.5 to 4.5 m. Such notices go up on its news page as they happen.

By air. Maio Airport, code MMO, sits just north of Porto Inglês with a single asphalt runway of 1,200 m, and it is the quietest of Cape Verde’s seven civil airports, handling 15,100 passengers in 2017. Domestic aviation here has been unstable: Bestfly Cabo Verde, successor to Binter Cabo Verde and TICV, suspended all operations in April 2024 and had not resumed them as of the latest reporting. The airports concession holder lists Maio among the seven airports it runs, but its live flight information tool covers only the four international airports. Confirm any Praia to Maio flight with the airline before building a trip around it, and keep the ferry as your fallback.

Getting around

The island is small, flat and circled by a single road, and public transport is informal. Buses run the loop, and hitching a lift is normal for residents and visitors alike. The Maio Biodiversity Foundation’s own advice to visitors is that you get around by taxi or by hiace, the shared minibuses that serve the villages. The municipality’s directory also lists car hire firms based in Porto Inglês, though the listing is dated and worth confirming on arrival.

Distances are short and the terrain level, so walking and cycling work, but shade is scarce, there is no water between villages, and the coastal wind is strong.

Practical info

Porto Inglês is where the island’s services are concentrated. The municipality’s public services directory lists a health centre, national police, volunteer fire brigade, post office, two pharmacies, the water and electricity utilities and a court, along with branches of several banks. The phone numbers on that page are dated, so treat it as a map of what exists rather than a call list. For anything beyond routine medical care, the referral is to Praia.

On money, the escudo is fixed to the euro, and the Maio Biodiversity Foundation quotes the rate visitors get as 1 EUR to 110 CVE. Its advice is to bring euros and change them at a bank in Maio or in Praia, and to expect that cards usually work but may fail at some cash machines, so have a backup way to get cash and check charges with your bank first. Take enough cash for your stay rather than assuming you can top up.

Accommodation is small guesthouses and residenciais, almost all in or near Porto Inglês. Book ahead around the September patron saint’s festival and at Easter, when islanders return home and beds and ferry seats disappear together.

Crime is not a normal concern on Maio, and the practical risks are the dull ones: sun, wind, no shade and a missed boat.