Santo Antão

Overview

Santo Antão is the northwesternmost island of Cape Verde, the largest of the Barlavento (windward) group at 779 km2, and the country’s main hiking destination. It is really two islands in one. The south and west are near desert: bare volcanic slopes rising to Tope de Coroa, at 1,979 m the island’s highest point. The northeast is the opposite: deep green ribeiras (stream valleys) where terraces of sugar cane, banana and yam climb from sea level towards a crest that regularly sits in cloud. Almost everything visitors come for lives on that green side: the Paúl valley, the farmed crater of Cova de Paúl, and the cliff path past Fontainhas.

There is no airport with commercial service. You arrive by ferry from Mindelo on São Vicente into Porto Novo, the island capital on the dry south coast, then cross the mountains by road. That crossing, whether over the cobbled Estrada da Corda along the ridge or around the newer coastal road, is the best introduction the island could ask for: within an hour you pass from bare rock to cloud forest to valleys a thousand metres deep.

The 2021 census counted 36,950 people on the island, spread between the municipalities of Porto Novo, Ribeira Grande and Paúl. Most travellers base themselves in Ponta do Sol, Ribeira Grande or the Paúl valley and walk: this is a place for boots, early starts and long descents, with grogue (sugar-cane spirit) at the bottom of the hill.

History & character

Diogo Afonso sighted Santo Antão in 1461 or 1462, but settlement only began in the first half of the 16th century, and it started on the wet side: the earliest evidence of a settlement at Ribeira Grande dates from 1548. Ribeira Grande became the seat of the island’s municipality in 1732 and remains the administrative heart of the north. The arid south coast filled in much later: Porto Novo began as a small fishing village called Porto dos Carvoeiros and only grew substantially from the 1910s, because for centuries there was little reason to live on the side of the island where nothing grows.

Two pieces of infrastructure rearranged the island’s geography. The Estrada da Corda, the stone-paved road built in the 1960s along the ridge line between the two great valley systems, connected Porto Novo to Ribeira Grande and Paúl and pulled the island’s traffic south; its construction led to the decline of the old port at Ponta do Sol. Then the harbour at Porto Novo, inaugurated in 1962 and modernised between 2012 and 2014, fixed the island’s front door firmly on the south coast: it handled over 300,000 passengers in 2017.

The character that resulted is rural and vertical. Fishing and agriculture are the main industries, and the agriculture happens on terraces cut into slopes that would be considered unusable almost anywhere else. Villages such as Fontainhas sit on knife-edge ridges above the sea because the ridge is where the flat ground is. People here grow sugar cane and distil it, walk paths their grandparents paved, and greet hikers in Kriolu, the vernacular, with Portuguese as the official language alongside.

Emigration has marked Santo Antão as it has all of Cape Verde: remittances and returnees’ houses are part of the landscape, and the population is smaller than it once was.

See & do

Santo Antão is a walking island. The classic routes are day hikes between villages, mostly downhill if you plan them right, on cobbled paths that double as ordinary local infrastructure.

The Cova to Paúl descent

The best-known walk on the island starts at Cova de Paúl, a volcanic crater with a farmed floor just off the Estrada da Corda, and drops over the rim into the Paúl valley. From the crater edge the whole valley opens beneath you, and the path zigzags down through terraces of sugar cane, banana, coffee, yam, papaya and mango to the coast at Vila das Pombas. Any aluguer running the mountain road can drop you at the crater in the morning.

The Fontainhas cliff path

From Ponta do Sol a paved path runs west along the north coast to Fontainhas, a village of a few hundred people draped over a ridge at 158 m above the sea, and continues through the hamlets of Corvo and Formiguinhas and along Chã de Mar to Cruzinha, about 5 to 6 hours in all. The trail clings to cliffs the entire way, crossing side ravines on old cobbles; you can turn back at Fontainhas for a short outing or arrange an aluguer pickup at Cruzinha for the full traverse.

Ribeira Grande and the inland valleys

Behind the town of Ribeira Grande two valleys cut inland: Ribeira Grande itself and Ribeira da Torre, whose upper reaches, together with Cova and upper Paúl, form the Cova-Paúl-Ribeira da Torre Natural Park. Village-to-village routes here, such as the 4 to 5 hour walk from Chã de Padre via Cabeça de Figueiral, link farmland, canyon scenery and hamlets that see far fewer walkers than Paúl.

The dry west

The other Santo Antão is worth a day or two. Tope de Coroa (1,979 m) rises from a high desert of volcanic rubble; hikers take the morning aluguer part of the way and walk from there. On the southwest coast, the fishing village of Tarrafal de Monte Trigo has a black sand beach sheltered by mountains from the wind, with good swimming and snorkelling on all but a few days a year.

Between hikes, visit a working trapiche (cane press) in the Paúl valley to see grogue made, or simply ride the Estrada da Corda end to end: the road itself is one of the island’s sights.

Towns & cities

Porto Novo

The island capital and only port of entry sits on the arid southeast coast facing São Vicente. It is the largest settlement on the island (the municipality counted 16,052 people in 2021) and became a city in 2005. Most travellers pass straight through, and that is a defensible choice: the town is a transport hub with ferry quays, aluguer ranks and car hire counters rather than a destination, though it is the natural base for the dry west.

Ribeira Grande (Povoação)

The historic main town of the north, seat of the island’s oldest municipality since 1732, stands where the Ribeira Grande and Ribeira da Torre valleys meet the sea. Known locally as Povoação, it has Portuguese colonial-era streets, the parish church of Nossa Senhora do Rosário, and the widest range of shops and services on the green side of the island. It is the junction everything north-coast passes through.

Ponta do Sol

Four kilometres beyond Ribeira Grande, Ponta do Sol is the northernmost town in Cape Verde, a fishing port that grew in the 1880s under the name Vila Dona Maria Pia. With around 2,000 residents, seafront restaurants and the trailhead for the Fontainhas cliff path, it is the island’s most popular base.

Vila das Pombas (Paúl)

The seat of Paúl municipality is a strip of houses along the shore at the mouth of the Ribeira do Paúl, 7 km southeast of Ribeira Grande. The town itself is quiet; the point of staying here is the valley behind it, with guesthouses scattered up the road towards Cabo da Ribeira and walks starting from the front door.

Food & drink

Food on Santo Antão is farm and boat cooking. The valleys supply sugar cane, coffee, yams, bananas, papaya and mango; the ports land fresh fish. Menus in guesthouses lean on cachupa (the national maize and bean stew), grilled catch of the day and whatever the terraces are producing; portions are built for people who walked six hours to earn them. Expect set dinners in smaller places, ordered in the morning for the evening; a three-course guesthouse dinner can run around 1,650 CVE.

The island’s signature product is grogue, an aguardente distilled from sugar cane pressed in a trapiche. Santo Antão, notably Ribeira do Paúl and Ribeira da Cruz, is one of the two centres of production in Cape Verde alongside Santiago, and quality varies widely from mill to mill because so much of it is artisanal. Try it straight, or as ponche, grogue mixed with lime and molasses, a cousin of Madeira’s poncha; locals also steep herbs such as rue, rosemary or anise in it for home remedies.

Coffee grown on the Paúl terraces turns up in some guesthouses; buying a bag directly from a grower is a better souvenir than anything in an airport.

Nature

Santo Antão’s landscapes come from the collision of trade-wind moisture with volcanic terrain. The northeast slopes and high ground intercept enough cloud to be semi-arid rather than desert, while the southern part of the island has a true desert climate; the result is a green windward crescent wrapped around a bare interior.

Two protected areas cover the extremes. The Cova-Paúl-Ribeira da Torre Natural Park (20.92 km2) protects the crater, the headwalls of the Paúl and Torre valleys and Pico da Cruz, ranging from about 400 m near Xoxo up to 1,585 m; it mixes forest and farmland and shelters threatened endemic plants such as Euphorbia tuckeyana and Globularia amygdalifolia, and it has been on Cape Verde’s UNESCO World Heritage tentative list since 2016. In the far west, the natural park around Tope de Coroa spans 84.92 km2 of high desert that holds 61 percent of Cape Verde’s endemic flowering plants, a quarter of them red-listed; free-ranging goats are the main threat.

For walkers the practical upshot is variety: cloud-zone pine and eucalyptus around Cova and Pico da Cruz, irrigated terraces lower down, and lunar rock in the west, all within a single day’s driving.

Climate

Santo Antão’s coast is mild all year. Open-Meteo ERA5 normals for 1991 to 2020 (coastal reference point) show daytime maxima ranging from 19.3 C in January and February to 24.2 C in September, with nights between 15.9 C and 20.9 C: an annual spread of barely five degrees.

Rain is concentrated in three months. The same normals give 45.9 mm in September, 21.6 mm in October and 20.7 mm in August; from March to July monthly totals are 2.5 mm or less, and the year totals only around 120 mm at the coast. Nationally the pattern is the same: irregular rain between August and October, often as brief heavy downpours, and next to nothing the rest of the year.

The numbers above describe sea level, and almost nowhere you will walk is at sea level. The island’s relief wrings moisture out of the trade-wind air: the northeast slopes and summits are semi-arid and often cloud-wrapped while the south is desert, so the same afternoon can be sunny in Porto Novo, misty at Cova and warm again in Pombas. Expect the crest (1,000 m and up) to be several degrees cooler than the coast, windy and occasionally wet even in dry months. Sun protection matters at altitude year-round.

When to go

The hiking season is broadly November to June: the months after the rains, when the northeast is at its greenest early on, temperatures are mildest and the weather is most settled. Winter (December to March) brings daytime maxima of 19 to 20 C at the coastal reference point, which on the trails means pleasantly cool walking; the crest and Cova can be cloudy and noticeably cold, so carry a layer.

Cape Verde’s short rainy season runs irregularly from August to October, with most rain in September; on Santo Antão that is when paths can be slippery, ravines can flood briefly after downpours and cloud sits low on the ridge, but it is also when the terraces are at their most productive. March to May adds the grogue harvest: the distilleries in the Paúl valley are working, which is a genuine reason to time a visit.

There is no month in which the island shuts down or the ferry stops running to a seasonal timetable, so the calendar question is really about rain, cloud and what you want to see growing. If your priority is the Fontainhas path in clear light, the dry months from December to June give you the best odds.

Getting there

The only way in is by sea from Mindelo. Santo Antão has no airport with commercial service: the old Agostinho Neto aerodrome near Ponta do Sol is deactivated, so you cannot fly here. The practical route from anywhere in the world is a flight to São Vicente, then the ferry from Mindelo across the channel to Porto Novo.

CV Interilhas operates the crossing. When we checked the operator’s site (September 2026), the day’s departures from São Vicente were 07:00 and 14:00, returning from Santo Antão at 09:00 and 16:00, with the crossing listed at 40 minutes; guidebook sources describe it as roughly an hour dock to dock, with boarding from 30 minutes before departure and a one-way fare of 800 CVE. Schedules on Cape Verdean inter-island routes change often: check cvinterilhas.cv or ask at the Mindelo ferry terminal the day before you travel, and buy the return leg early if you have a flight to catch from São Vicente.

For wider context on reaching the archipelago, including international flights into the country, see the Cape Verde country guide.

Getting around

There is no public bus network; the island runs on aluguers, shared minibuses and pickups that leave when full. They cluster at the Porto Novo ferry quay for each arrival, so onward transport to Ribeira Grande, Ponta do Sol or the Paúl valley is easiest straight off the boat.

Rough aluguer fares (September 2026, cash only): about 100 CVE for local hops under 10 km, 400 to 500 CVE from Porto Novo to Paúl, and around 700 CVE from Porto Novo to Tarrafal de Monte Trigo; on the north side, aluguers ply the Paúl to Ribeira Grande road at least every half hour. Chartering a vehicle privately (a frete) costs around 4,000 CVE from Porto Novo to Paúl, about 7,000 CVE to Tarrafal, or 8,000 to 12,000 CVE for a full-day excursion; car hire is available at the ferry terminal for roughly 50 to 60 EUR a day.

Two roads link the coasts. The Estrada da Corda, built in the 1960s, climbs from Porto Novo along the ridge between the island’s great valleys, passing Cova before dropping to Ribeira Grande; the newer coastal road (EN1-SA03) runs east around the shore towards Pombas. Ask for the mountain road at least once: it is slower and the reason you came.

Distances are short on the map and long on the ground: Porto Novo to Ponta do Sol is about 20 km direct, but allow well over an hour by road.

Practical info

Money is the escudo (CVE), pegged to the euro at 110.265 CVE per EUR since 2002, and many tourist operators quote prices in euros. Day-to-day spending on Santo Antão is overwhelmingly cash: aluguers take cash only, and small guesthouses and village shops generally do too, so withdraw or change money in Mindelo or in the main towns before heading into the valleys.

Porto Novo, Ribeira Grande and Ponta do Sol are the island’s service towns, home to the three municipal administrations (Porto Novo, Ribeira Grande and Paúl divide the island between them). Sort anything administrative, and stock up on supplies, in one of these three before heading to smaller villages, where a single shop may be the only commerce.

For hikers, the practical kit list is short but non-negotiable: proper footwear for cobbled descents, sun protection, more water than feels necessary (villages en route often sell drinks, but not always), and offline maps downloaded in advance, since Google Maps coverage of the island is poor. Mobile signal drops in the deeper valleys; tell your guesthouse where you are walking. Portuguese is the official language and Kriolu the everyday one; English works mainly in tourism businesses.

The main things to plan around here are terrain and sun. Walk cliff paths with attention in wind, avoid ravine bottoms during and after heavy rain in the August to October season, and start long descents early to finish before the midday heat.