Cova de Paúl

Overview

Cova de Paúl is an extinct volcanic crater in the east-central highlands of Santo Antão, at the south-western corner of the municipality of Paúl. Its floor lies at about 1,166 m above sea level, the highest point of the rim reaches roughly 1,500 m, and the bowl is about 1 km across. OpenStreetMap maps it as an extinct volcano at 17.1078 N and 25.0627 W with the same 1,166 m floor height.

What makes it unusual is that the floor is farmed. Maize and beans are grown on the crater bottom in a patchwork of small plots, while the walls facing north and north-east carry natural and semi-natural vegetation and the south-facing walls carry planted pine and cypress. Cape Verde’s UNESCO tentative-list dossier records that this rain-fed farming yields two harvests a year inside the crater: one in the rainy season and a second at the start of the hot season, when moisture rises off the ground by evaporation.

A few people live down there. The 2010 census counted a population of 10 inside the crater, administratively part of the settlement of Cabo da Ribeira.

Part of a protected park

The crater is the centrepiece of the Cova-Paul-Ribeira da Torre Natural Park, one of ten natural parks in Cape Verde. The park covers 20.92 km2, split between the municipalities of Ribeira Grande (8.91 km2), Paúl (8.85 km2) and Porto Novo (3.16 km2), and takes in the crater, the upper Ribeira do Paúl, the upper Ribeira da Torre above Xoxo and the summit of Pico da Cruz at 1,585 m. Cape Verde put it on the UNESCO World Heritage tentative list as a mixed site on 15 March 2016.

Two things bring most people up here: the viewpoint on the northern rim, which looks down the whole length of the Paúl valley to the sea, and the long walk down that valley from the same spot. The island guide to Santo Antão and the Cape Verde country guide set both in context.

History

How the crater formed

Cova is a caldera rather than a cone, and it is long dead. The formation is dated to between 1.4 million and 700,000 years ago. The tentative-list dossier describes it as covered by phonolitic lava and tephra of Pliocene and Pleistocene age over andosol and leptosol soils, and notes that the north-east side of the crater is connected to the Ribeira do Paúl by a large lava tunnel formed when lava cooled quickly. Hydrologically the crater acts as a recharge basin for the springs that feed both the Ribeira do Paúl and the Ribeira da Torre.

Cape Verde’s own tourism inventory for Paúl makes the same point in plainer language: the crater, with the forest blocks of Pêro Dias, Pico da Cruz and Lenhal, is why the greenest municipality in the country has running water in its valleys through the year. The Ribeira do Paúl rises just north-east of the crater near Cabo da Ribeira and reaches the Atlantic at Pombas.

Farming the bowl

Settlement of what is now the park began at the end of the 16th century, from Ribeira Grande, the island’s first town. Some 350 families lived inside the present park boundary, farming and keeping goats whose milk went into the traditional goat cheese still made on the island. The technique that made the slopes usable was terracing: dry-stone basalt walls, their geometry dictated by the gradient, stepping up the mountainside. Rain-fed crops on those terraces, concentrated around Chã Mato and Corda, are maize, pigeon peas, sweet potatoes, pumpkins and potatoes, plus fruit trees and vines. The same rain-fed system extends into the crater itself.

Downhill, in the irrigated valleys of Paúl and Ribeira da Torre, the crops change to sugar cane, coffee, yam, banana, papaya and mango.

The road that made it reachable

The paths and roads of the park were built from local basalt by the communities themselves, under orders from the colonial administration and in part by prisoners serving sentences for minor offences. The old Ribeira Grande to Porto Novo road dates from the first decade of the 1960s and is still in daily use. Portuguese Wikipedia knows this road as the Estrada da Corda: a cobbled road out of Porto Novo that runs along the ridge line dividing the Ribeira Grande and Ribeira da Torre valleys. Building it to serve the new port at Porto Novo is what ended the role of Boca da Pistola at Ponta do Sol as the island’s main point of arrival. In the current national road numbering it is the EN1-SA01.

Protection

The area was declared protected by decree-law 3/2004, to conserve its geological and biological diversity, protect wild species and ecosystems and promote sustainable use of natural resources. A management plan including an ecotourism plan followed. The 2016 tentative-list submission, made by the Ministry of Culture, argues the case under criteria (v), (vii) and (x).

Visiting

Getting to the crater

The approach is by the old Porto Novo to Ribeira Grande road over the island’s spine, the EN1-SA01. The government tourism inventory describes the turn-off exactly: a sign at a junction on that road marks the direction of Cova, and from there you can drive right down to the crater floor, next to an agricultural nursery. OpenStreetMap records a car park on the rim above the crater, tagged as open at all hours.

Most visitors come up from Porto Novo, where the ferry from Mindelo docks, in a shared aluguer or a chartered car. Wikivoyage reports a shared seat from the ferry towards Paúl or Ribeira Grande at 400 to 500 CVE and a full day of driving at 8,000 to 12,000 CVE for the vehicle. Those are traveller-reported figures rather than a published tariff, so agree the price before setting off.

The rim viewpoint

The photograph everyone comes for is taken from the northern rim, not from the floor. From the crater bottom you climb the north edge, directly below the settlement of Pedra Rachada, and get the view of the entire Paúl valley from its bed up to the mountain tops. The tentative-list dossier names Pedra Ratxada and Pico da Cruz as the park’s two principal belvederes, and says the Cova and Pico da Cruz viewpoints take in slopes too steep for people to reach, where endemic plants survive undisturbed.

Walking down into the valley

The descent from the crater to the coast is the walk that made Santo Antão a hiking island. The official inventory gives the circuit as Cova, Chã de Manuel dos Santos, Campo de Cão, Figueiral and Cidade das Pombas, about 15 km on local footpaths and lanes, running now along a long green watercourse and now under slopes that rise close to vertical at Rocha Grande and Santa Isabel, through the dense fog typical of these heights. It calls the circuit one of the most used on the island, notes that it can be walked in either direction, and recommends going downhill from Cova to Paúl.

No government or park source publishes a walking time for the route, and this guide will not invent one. What is fixed is the shape of the day: roughly 15 km, and a drop of about 1,170 m from the crater floor to sea level at Pombas, much of it on stone-laid mule paths and cobbled lanes that are hard on the knees and slippery when wet. Poles help, and so does starting early enough that a slow group finishes in daylight.

Two variants run from the same start. You can stay on the road, passing Chã de João Vaz and the Passagem area on the way to Cidade das Pombas, or take the westward turning at the head of the cart track and walk through Chãzinha among coffee bushes and fruit trees to Boca de Figueiral, rejoining the track for the last stretch into town. The valley itself, its villages and its grogue stills are covered on the Paúl valley page.

Navigation and path condition

The tourism inventory itself reported the local footpaths in poor condition and in need of urgent maintenance, and recommended signposting the routes and training local guides. Take that at face value: a local guide is a reasonable expense rather than a luxury. For self-navigation, Wikivoyage notes that Google Maps coverage of Santo Antão’s trails is very poor and advises an OpenStreetMap-based offline app instead.

Tips

Cloud decides your visit

Cloud decides whether Cova is worth the drive on any given day. The tentative-list dossier describes the crater walls and the valley heads sitting between about 900 m and 1,500 m, where the trade winds carry moisture up from the head of the Ribeira do Paúl and pour it over into the crater like falling water, and it records that local legends grew up around that fog. The tourism inventory calls the fog characteristic of these high zones and adds that on a neighbouring high circuit the moisture falls sideways during the night rather than as rain.

Wikivoyage rates the inland Porto Novo to Ribeira Grande route as worth doing on a day with no cloud or high cloud, which is the right test for the viewpoint too. If the rim is closed in, wait an hour or come back another day.

Dress for altitude

The nearest published highland record is Espongeiro, at 1,371 m on the same central plateau, where the annual mean temperature is 15.1 C and January daily lows sit near 10.9 C. On the coast the annual average is about 23 C. Santo Antão has a warmer wet season from July to December or January and a cooler dry season from December or January to June. Add wind: the north-east trades blow across the island most of the time. A windproof layer is worth the space in the bag even if you started the day in shorts on the coast.

When the water runs

July and August are the rainy months, and the dossier describes waterfalls falling from above 1,000 m in that season. Rainfall is modest in absolute terms: Paúl averaged 324 mm a year over the decade covered by the tourism inventory, rising to as much as 700 mm at the highest points of the Pico da Cruz massif. Wet stone paths in September and October are the main practical consequence.

What is not there

There is no ticket office, barrier or admission charge at the crater, and no visitor centre, cafe or toilet block. The Câmara Municipal do Paúl runs a tourism section on its website, but its listings pages for tourist sites returned no items when checked in September 2026, so there is no municipal opening time or contact to quote. Carry your own water and food.

Do not pick anything

The park holds one of the largest concentrations of endemic plants in Cape Verde: 36 endemic species recorded, 15 of them on the IUCN Red List, and two local endemics, Carex antoniensis and a subspecies of Ficus sycomorus, critically endangered. Some surviving populations grow on farmland in the Paúl valley itself. Leave plants where they are, and keep to established paths on the walk down to Paúl.