Which Cape Verde island should you choose?

The quick answer

If you want to stop reading here: Sal for a first trip focused on beaches, watersports and easy logistics. Boa Vista for the same but quieter, with bigger dunes and turtles. Santo Antão for hiking, and it is not close. São Vicente for music and city life. Fogo for the volcano. Santiago for history and the most lived-in feel. Maio, Brava and São Nicolau if you want almost nobody around and are prepared for the travel that entails.

All nine islands compared

Still torn between the two main beach islands? Read Sal or Boa Vista? for a direct comparison.

Note the last column. Four islands have international airports; the rest require a domestic flight or a ferry, which changes how much of your holiday is spent travelling. See flights and ferries.

Best for beaches: Sal, Boa Vista, Maio

These three are the flat, dry, sandy islands, and they are where the vast majority of visitors go.

Sal is the most developed and the easiest. Santa Maria is walkable, full of restaurants, and has the best range of watersports in the country — it is the main kitesurfing destination. The island itself is barren; people who come expecting scenery are disappointed, and people who come for the beach and the sea rarely are.

Boa Vista has longer, emptier beaches and genuine sand dunes, plus the most important turtle nesting beaches in the archipelago. It is quieter and more resort-dominated than Sal, with less to do independently. Roads outside the main routes are rough, so getting around takes longer than the map suggests.

Maio is the same landscape with almost no tourism. Long empty beaches, very little infrastructure, and few organised activities. Excellent if that is what you want, frustrating if it is not.

Best for hiking: Santo Antão, Fogo, São Nicolau

Santo Antão is the reason serious walkers come to Cape Verde. Deep valleys, cobbled paths between villages, terraced slopes and a dramatic drop from arid ridges into green ravines. The Paul Valley and the Cova crater are the classic routes. There is no airport — you fly to São Vicente and take the ferry from Mindelo to Porto Novo.

Fogo is a different kind of walking: a single enormous volcano, with the climb to Pico do Fogo and the strange landscape of Chã das Caldeiras, where people still live and farm inside the caldera among the flows from the 2014 eruption.

São Nicolau offers mountain scenery similar in character to Santo Antão with far fewer visitors, at the cost of less developed infrastructure and fewer marked routes.

Full detail in our Cape Verde hiking guide.

Best for culture and music: São Vicente, Santiago

São Vicente exists around Mindelo, the country's cultural capital and the best place in the archipelago to hear live music — morna and coladeira played most nights in small bars. The island is dry and not especially scenic, and there is really only one good beach. You come for the town.

Santiago is the largest and most populous island, home to the capital Praia and to Cidade Velha, a UNESCO World Heritage site and the first European settlement in the tropics. The interior is green and mountainous, the markets at Assomada are the real thing, and the island feels lived-in rather than visited. Beaches are its weak point.

Best for peace: Brava, Maio

Brava is the smallest inhabited island, green, often misty, reachable only by ferry, and visited by very few people. Walking, flowers and quiet are the entire proposition. Getting there requires commitment and flexibility — see getting to Brava.

Maio offers solitude of a different kind: flat, sandy and sunny rather than green and misty, and slightly easier to reach.

Both suit travellers who are content with little to do. Neither suits a one-week trip with tight flight connections.

First trip, families, couples

The mistakes people make

• Booking Sal expecting green landscapes. Sal is desert. The name means salt. It is not a scenic island and it does not pretend to be — the sea is the attraction.
• Booking Santo Antão expecting beaches. There are essentially none worth planning around.
• Trying to see four islands in a week. Inter-island travel is slower and less reliable than people expect. Two islands in a week is comfortable; three is pushing it.
• Underestimating the wind. On Sal and Boa Vista the wind is strongest roughly November to March. Excellent for kitesurfing, less so for lying on a beach. See best time to visit.
• Assuming islands are close because they look close. Some pairs are well connected; others require going via a third island.

Combining two islands

The most rewarding trips usually pair one beach island with one mountain or cultural island. The classic combination is Sal or Boa Vista plus São Vicente and Santo Antão: sun and swimming first, then music in Mindelo and hiking across the channel.

Fogo pairs naturally with Santiago, since flights and ferries connect them and Praia is the main hub for the southern islands.

Work out the route before you book, not after — flight and ferry frequencies shape what is realistic. See island hopping and our ready-made itineraries.