Ponta Preta

Overview

Ponta Preta is a headland and the beach beside it on the southwest coast of Sal, about 2 km west of Santa Maria and roughly the same distance from Ponta do Sinó, the southernmost point of the island. The name is Portuguese for “black tip”.

Two different places share the name in practice. One is a wide, open, dune backed beach that anyone can walk to from town, and which Wikipedia rates alongside Praia de Santa Maria as the most used beach on the island. The other is the wave that breaks off the point on the right days in winter: a reef and point break that surfers, windsurfers and kitesurfers have shared for decades, and the reason the GKA Kite World Tour opens its kite-surf season here.

Most visitors get the first version. On a windless summer afternoon Ponta Preta is a long pale beach with dunes behind it, a view down the coast to the lighthouse at Ponta do Sinó, and nothing much happening. On a February morning with a northwest swell and the trades blowing, it is one of the more serious pieces of water in the eastern Atlantic.

The headland sits inside the Ponta do Sinó nature reserve, one of five nature reserves on Sal, and at the edge of a designated tourism development zone. Both halves of that description are visible on the ground.

The Sal page covers the rest of the island, and the Cape Verde page the archipelago around it.

History

Ponta Preta has almost no recorded human history, and that is the honest answer. There is no village here, no fort, no chapel and no monument. Sal was the driest and emptiest of the inhabited islands, and this stretch of its southwest shore was simply the coast beyond Santa Maria’s salt trade until tourism arrived.

What the place does have is a sporting record, and it is a real one. Windsurfers and kitesurfers had been riding the point long before it was formally on a tour: the Kite and Windsurfing Guide describes it, in big northwest swell, as one of the world’s fastest and most beautiful waves, and notes that surfers, windsurfers and kiters all share it. The GKA Kite World Tour has run kite-surf world cup events at the break repeatedly since 2018.

The event that people on Sal still talk about is 2019. Mitu Monteiro, a kitesurfer from Sal known on tour as “The Maestro”, won the world cup on his own home break, reaching the final against another Cape Verdean, Airton Cozzolino. Monteiro called it “a historic event and something we’ll talk about for years”, and put the local riders’ style down to their beginnings: “Here in Cape Verde most of us were surfers before kitesurfers and that is what makes the difference in our riding.”

The tour kept coming back. In 2025 the Portuguese rider Pedro Matos beat Cozzolino in the men’s final and Capucine Delannoy took her first women’s title here; the 2026 edition ran from 16 to 21 February with 24 men and 18 women from 13 countries and 10,000 euros in prize money.

The other recent history is construction. Wikivoyage puts Santa Maria’s larger hotels at the western end of town, “where you will also find the famous dunes and beach of Ponta Preta”, and adds that this is also where many new resorts are being built. The point itself is still open ground, but the resort strip has been walking towards it for years, and the tourism development zone on the Wikipedia entry is not a hypothetical.

Visiting

Getting there

Ponta Preta is about 2 km west of Santa Maria, which in practice means a walk of roughly 40 minutes from the town centre if you follow the sand and the shoreline west past the hotels. That is the pleasant way to do it. A taxi or a quad from town takes minutes on the tracks behind the dunes, and every organised island tour that includes Buracona and Pedra de Lume tends to stop here too, since the national tourism board lists Ponta Preta among the island’s set pieces.

Walking out and getting a lift back is a fair plan. The wind is behind you on the way out and in your face on the way home.

What is actually there

Sand, dunes, black volcanic rock at the point and the open Atlantic. There is no ticket, no gate and no opening time. There is also, at the point itself, nothing to buy: the beach clubs and bars belong to the resorts strung along the shore to the north, and they are private. Bring water, bring shade, and expect wind.

The coast here faces west, which makes this one of the better places on Sal to be at the end of the day, with the sun going down over the water and the dunes turning colour behind you.

Swimming, honestly

This is a beach for walking and watching rather than swimming. There is no lifeguard, the bottom at the point is rock rather than sand, and the shorebreak is heavy enough that the sailing guides treat launching here as a hazard in its own right. The UK Foreign Office is blunt about Cape Verde generally: tides and currents around the islands are very strong, waves “can be unpredictable and have a strong undertow”, and the standing advice is to swim only on beaches with a lifeguard on duty.

If you want a swim on this side of the island, the sheltered strip of Praia de Santa Maria in front of the town is the sensible choice.

The wave

For anyone who came for the surf, the numbers are these. It is an exposed reef and point break with both a right, which is the good one, and a left; it wants a northwest swell with an offshore easterly wind, works best around low tide, and is at its most consistent in winter, with clean surfable waves in December roughly 59 percent of the time. Submerged rocks are the main hazard and it is rarely crowded. The GKA describes the break as volcanic reef about 15 metres from the shore, capable of big, powerful, glassy waves up to 6 metres, with northeasterly trades of 15 to 25 knots blowing almost daily from November to June and strongest between 09:00 and 15:00.

Watching costs nothing and is the point of the place for most people. Because the reef sits so close in, you can follow a whole ride from dry sand.

Tips

Go late. The trades are strongest through the middle of the day, which is exactly when a walk along an exposed beach is least fun, and the light and the sunset both improve after about 16:00.

Come in winter if the wave is why you are here. November to June is the windy half of the year, the tour schedules its Cape Verde event in February or March, and December is statistically the most reliable month for clean surf. Competition windows move with the forecast, so check the tour site before you build a trip around a contest.

Wear something on your feet. The point is volcanic rock, the reef is close in, and the sand between town and the beach is walkable but hot by midday.

Treat the dunes as part of the reserve, not as a car park. Ponta Preta lies inside the Ponta do Sinó nature reserve, and quad tracks through dune vegetation do lasting damage on an island this dry.

Finally, keep expectations calibrated. Ponta Preta is a good beach and, on its days, a great wave, but it is a wild strip of coast with no services on it. If you want a lounger and a drink, that is Santa Maria’s job, twenty minutes back the way you came.