Monte Verde

Overview

Monte Verde is the highest point of São Vicente, a broad volcanic summit about 6 km east of central Mindelo whose upper slopes stay green on an island that is otherwise brown. It is also the island’s only natural park, and the drive to the top is the standard half day out from the city.

How high it actually is

The tourism inventory compiled by Cape Verde’s Direcção Geral do Turismo gives 744 m in its entry on the park, and 750 m twenty pages earlier in the same document’s geography chapter. The Portuguese Wikipedia article uses 750 m, citing military survey maps, and OpenStreetMap carries the same figure on its summit node. The 744 m reading is the better traced of the two and is the figure used here, though the difference of six metres changes nothing on the ground. Madeiral, the second high point of the same eroded ring, reaches about 680 m.

Why it is green

The summit platform tilts to the north-east, straight into the moist trade wind air, and that tilt is the whole reason for the name. The tourism inventory describes the resulting humidity as the factor behind a landscape that contrasts with the aridity of the rest of the island. Mindelo records around 127 mm of rain a year, and the higher ground of Monte Verde is the only part of São Vicente that gets appreciably more.

Green here means damp grass, scrub and lichen after the rains, not forest. The national protected areas administration called Monte Verde the only sample of a sub-humid ecosystem left on São Vicente, holding all of the island’s native flora communities. Of 93 inventoried plant species, 17 are on the island’s red list.

The view, and what sits on top

From the upper road you look down over Mindelo and the whole of Porto Grande bay, with Monte Cara on the far side of the water, and across the channel to Santo Antão. Santa Luzia and the islets of Branco and Raso lie to the south-east, and on clear days São Nicolau shows on the horizon.

The actual summit is not a bare peak. Television, radio and mobile masts stand at the top, and OpenStreetMap maps the compound around them as military land with a gate on the access road, so visitors stop just short of the highest ground. The view is no worse for it.

History

The recorded history of the mountain is mostly a history of what the island needed from it: water first, then a plant list, then somewhere to put antennas.

The city’s first water came off this massif

Mindelo grew as a coaling port with no water of its own. On 27 May 1886 the town got its first piped supply, drawn from wells at Madeiralzinho and springs at Madeiral on the flank of this same massif and carried roughly 10 km into the city through cast iron pipes. Water was then sold on from ten taps at the company building and carried to houses by women with 20-litre tins. As the rains failed the springs weakened and the company declined; its old headquarters was restored by the municipality in 1998.

From botanical curiosity to natural park

The plants here were catalogued long before anyone thought of protecting them: the species list still quoted for the mountain traces back to nineteenth-century botanical work on the Cape Verde flora. Formal protection came much later. Decreto-Lei nº 3/2003 of 24 February, later amended by Decreto-Lei nº 44/2006, set up the national protected areas system and its six categories, of which Parque Natural is one. For years afterwards the government’s own protected areas pages still listed Monte Verde under a proposed status rather than a confirmed one.

By 2016 it was settled. Resolução nº 36/2016, published in the official gazette on 17 March 2016, lists PN Monte Verde as São Vicente’s single protected area, with a terrestrial area of 311.9 ha, roughly 3.1 km2. The same document, a national business plan for the protected areas network, names Monte Verde as one of four sites where entrance fees would be a realistic way to raise money, alongside Serra Malagueta, Monte Gordo and Fogo. Ten years on there is still no ticket office on the hill, but that is the direction of travel worth knowing about.

Visiting

There is no gate, no ticket, no visitor centre and no marked trail. You go up a road, you stop where the road runs out, and you look.

Getting up there

The access road is a third-class national road, EN3-SV-03. It leaves the Mindelo to Baía das Gatas road at a junction about 200 m above sea level and climbs roughly 6.1 km to a turning area just below the antennas. Routing engines running on that map data give about 11.7 km and half an hour from the middle of Mindelo, of which the climb itself accounts for the great majority of the time. The Portuguese Wikipedia article calls it 15 minutes from Mindelo, which is optimistic for the state of the last few kilometres.

Practically, that leaves three ways up.

• Taxi. Taxis are common in Mindelo and this is the usual arrangement: agree a round trip price and a waiting time before you set off, because nothing passes up there to bring you back.
• Organised tour or hired car. Island tours normally pair Monte Verde with Baía das Gatas and Calhau, since they share the same road out of town.
• On foot. From the junction it is about 6 km and some 500 m of ascent each way, on the road, with no shade, no water and no shelter. Start early or do not start.

There is no scheduled bus to the summit. The shared minibuses that serve the coast run to Baía das Gatas and Calhau, not up the mountain, and even those are irregular outside weekends.

At the top

The last kilometre passes several informal stopping places on the ridge, and these are where the views are taken from. A geodetic survey marker stands at the high point, photographed there as recently as 2022. A small refreshment kiosk is mapped near the top of the road, but no hours are published for it and you should carry your own water regardless.

What lives here

The vegetation worth looking for sits on the steep, ungrazed ground rather than beside the road: Limonium jovibarba, Sonchus daltonii, Lobularia canariensis subsp. fruticosa and Campylanthus glaber subsp. spathulatus, with stands of Furcraea foetida and Lantana camara on the escarpments and occasional marmolano, Sideroxylon marginatum. The Cape Verde endemic spurge Euphorbia tuckeyana has been photographed in flower here. Bird and reptile life is thin and specific: kestrel, brown-necked raven, and a Mabuya skink recorded as the sole reptile.

Tips

Timing and clothes

Go in the morning if you want the island laid out clearly, and accept that the summit makes its own weather. This is the wettest and mistiest ground on a very dry island, so cloud sitting on the top while Mindelo is in full sun is normal rather than bad luck. Take a windproof layer even in August. There is no shelter at the top beyond the lee of a parked car.

Pair it with the coast

The turning for Monte Verde is on the road out to Baía das Gatas, which makes the obvious combination. The bay is a natural pool closed off from the open sea by a reef barrier, less than 10 km east of Mindelo, and its name comes from the nurse sharks once abundant in its water. It has electricity and phone service but drinking water still arrives by tanker from the city, and there is no permanent public transport link, only the usual weekend buses and minibuses.

Behave like it is a park, because it is

Nothing on the hill tells you that you are inside a protected area, so it is on you. Seventeen of the plant species recorded here are red listed on São Vicente, and the surviving native communities are already under pressure from cultivation. Stay on the road and existing tracks, pick nothing, take rubbish back down with you, and keep cameras pointed at the view rather than at the fenced installation on the summit.

Fitting it into a São Vicente trip

Two hours from Mindelo and back covers it, three or four with the coast added. It works best as the first thing you do on the island, because it is the clearest way to see how São Vicente is laid out: the port and Mindelo on one side, the dry interior and the eastern beaches on the other, Santo Antão across the channel. As mountain scenery it is the modest version, and the larger parks elsewhere in Cape Verde are the reason to keep travelling.