Cape Verde, also referred to in English by its Portuguese name Cabo Verde, and known officially as the Republic of Cabo Verde, is an archipelagic country in the central Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of West Africa. It consists of ten volcanic islands with a combined land area of about 4,033 square kilometres (1,557 sq mi). These islands lie between 600 and 850 kilometres (370 and 530 miles) west of Cap-Vert (i.e., Dakar), the westernmost point of continental Africa, after which they are named. Cape Verde forms part of the Macaronesia ecoregion, along with the Azores, the Canary Islands, Madeira and the Savage Islands.
The archipelago was uninhabited until the 15th century, when Portuguese explorers settled the islands, establishing one of the first European settlements in the tropics. Its strategic position gave it a significant role in the transatlantic slave trade during the 16th and 17th centuries; the islands saw rapid economic growth driven by the trade of manufactured goods, rum, cloth for African slaves, ivory, and gold. By the mid 19th century, increased foreign competition, persistent drought, and the decline of the slave trade led to economic decline and emigration; Cape Verde gradually recovered as an important commercial centre and stopping point for major shipping routes.
Cape Verde became independent in 1975. Since the early 1990s, it has been a stable representative democracy and has remained one of the most developed and democratic countries in Africa. Lacking natural resources, its developing economy is mostly service-oriented, with a growing focus on tourism and foreign investment. With a population of around 530,000 (as of 2026), Cape Verde is among the least populous countries in Africa. The Cape Verdean people trace their ancestry primarily to West African populations, with additional contributions from early Portuguese settlers and other groups who came to the islands. A sizeable diaspora exists across the world, especially in the United States and Portugal, considerably outnumbering the inhabitants on the islands. Cape Verde is a member state of the African Union.
The official language is Portuguese, while the recognized national language is Cape Verdean Creole (Crioulo), which is spoken by the vast majority of the population. As of the 2021 census, the most populous islands were Santiago (269,370) – which hosts the country's capital and largest city, Praia – São Vicente (74,016), Santo Antão (36,632), Fogo (33,519) and Sal (33,347). The largest cities are Praia (137,868), Mindelo (69,013), Espargos (24,500) and Assomada (21,297).
Etymology
The country is named after the Cap-Vert peninsula on the Senegalese coast. The name Cap-Vert, in turn, comes from the Portuguese language Cabo Verde ('green cape'), the name given to it by Portuguese explorers in 1444, a few years before they came across the islands. Historically, the name has been anglicised as Cape Verde. In 2013, the country's delegation informed the United Nations that only Cabo Verde (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˈkabu ˈveɾdɨ] ) and not other translations should be used for official purposes.
History
The archipelago was formed approximately 40–50 million years ago during the Eocene epoch. Before the arrival of Europeans, the Cape Verde Islands were uninhabited. They were discovered by Genoese and Portuguese navigators around 1456. According to Portuguese official records, the first discoveries were made by Genoa-born António de Noli, who was afterwards appointed governor of Cape Verde by Portuguese King Afonso V. Other navigators mentioned as contributing to discoveries on the Cape Verde archipelago are Diogo Dias, Diogo Afonso, Venetian Alvise Cadamosto and Diogo Gomes (who had accompanied António de Noli on his voyage of discovery, and who claimed to have been the first to land on Santiago and the first to name that island).
In 1462, Portuguese settlers arrived at Santiago and founded a settlement they called Ribeira Grande. Today it is called Cidade Velha ("Old City"), to distinguish it from Ribeira Grande. The original Ribeira Grande was the first permanent European settlement in the tropics.
In the 16th century, the archipelago prospered from the Atlantic slave trade. Pirates occasionally attacked the Portuguese settlements. Francis Drake, an English privateer, twice sacked Ribeira Grande in 1585 when it was a part of the Iberian Union. After a French attack in 1712, the town declined in importance relative to nearby Praia, which became the capital in 1770.
The decline in the slave trade in the 19th century resulted in an economic crisis. Cape Verde's early prosperity slowly evaporated. However, the islands' position astride mid-Atlantic shipping lanes made Cape Verde an ideal location for re-supplying ships. Because of its excellent harbour Mindelo, located on the island of São Vicente, the country became an important commercial centre. Diplomat Edmund Roberts visited Cape Verde in 1832. Cape Verde was the first stop on Charles Darwin's voyage with HMS Beagle in 1832.
With few natural resources and inadequate sustainable investment from the Portuguese, citizens grew increasingly dissatisfied with their colonial masters, who refused to provide the local authorities with more autonomy. In 1951, Portugal changed Cape Verde's status from a colony to an overseas province in an attempt to blunt growing nationalism.
In 1956, Amílcar Cabral and a group of fellow Cape Verdeans and Guineans organized (in Portuguese Guinea) the clandestine African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde (PAIGC). It demanded improvement in economic, social, and political conditions in Cape Verde and Portuguese Guinea and formed the basis of the two nations' independence movement. Its objective was to achieve independence through nonviolent protest. However, in 1959, the Portuguese authorities reacted with repression, marked by violence and mass arrests, persuading the PAIGC that armed struggle was the only viable means to overthrow the colonial regime. Moving its headquarters to Conakry, Guinea, in 1960, the PAIGC began an armed rebellion against Portugal in 1961. Acts of sabotage eventually grew into a war in Portuguese Guinea that pitted 10,000 PAIGC soldiers against 35,000 Portuguese and African troops.
By 1972, the PAIGC controlled much of Portuguese Guinea despite the presence of the Portuguese troops, but the organization did not attempt to disrupt Portuguese control in Cape Verde. Portuguese Guinea declared independence in 1973 and was granted de jure independence in 1974. A budding independence movement originally led by Amílcar Cabral, who was assassinated in 1973, passed on to his half-brother Luís Cabral and culminated in independence for the archipelago in 1975.
Following the April 1974 revolution in Portugal, the PAIGC became an active political movement in Cape Verde. In December 1974, the PAIGC and Portugal signed an agreement providing for a transitional government composed of Portuguese and Cape Verdeans. On 30 June 1975, Cape Verdeans elected a National Assembly which received instruments of independence from Portugal on 5 July 1975.
On 2 February 2024, Cape Verde became the third African country to be free of malaria.
Government and politics
Government
Cape Verde is a stable semi-presidential representative democratic republic. In 2026, it was a joint second most democratic nation in Africa (alongside Mauritius and South Africa), ranking 40th in the world, according to the electoral democracy score of the V-Dem Democracy indices.
The constitution – adopted in 1980 and revised in 1992, 1995 and 1999 – defines the basic principles of its government. The president is the head of state and is elected by popular vote for a five-year term. The prime minister is the head of government and proposes other ministers and secretaries of state. The prime minister is nominated by the National Assembly and appointed by the president. Members of the National Assembly are elected by popular vote for five-year terms. In 2016, three parties held seats in the National Assembly – MpD (36), PAICV (25), and the Cape Verdean Independent Democratic Union (UCID) (3). The two main political parties are PAICV and MpD.
The judicial system consists of a Supreme Court of Justice – whose members are appointed by the president, the National Assembly, and the Board of the Judiciary – and regional courts. Separate courts hear civil, constitutional, and criminal cases. Appeals are to the Supreme Court.
International recognition
In 2013, United States President Barack Obama said that Cape Verde was "a real success story." Among other achievements, it has been recognized with the following assessments:
Foreign relations
Cape Verde follows a policy of nonalignment and seeks cooperative relations with all friendly states. Angola, Brazil, China, Libya, Cuba, France, Guinea-Bissau, Germany, Italy, Portugal, Spain, São Tomé and Príncipe, Senegal, Russia, Luxembourg, and the United States maintain embassies in Praia. Cape Verde maintains a vigorously active foreign policy especially in Africa.
Cape Verde is a founding member state of the Community of Portuguese Language Countries, also known as the Lusophone Commonwealth, an international organization and political association of Lusophone nations across four continents, where Portuguese is an official language. Cape Verde has bilateral relations with some Lusophone nations and holds membership in a number of international organizations. It also participates in most international conferences on economic and political issues. Since 2007, Cape Verde has a special partnership status with the EU, under the Cotonou Agreement, and might apply for special membership, in particular because the Cape Verdean escudo, the country's currency, is indexed to the euro. In 2011 Cape Verde ratified the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. In 2017 Cape Verde signed the UN treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
In November 2021, Cape Verde opened its first embassy in Nigeria.
Military
The military of Cape Verde consists of the National Guard and the Coast Guard; 0.7% of the country's GDP was spent on the military in 2005. Having fought their only battles in the war for independence against Portugal between 1974 and 1975, the efforts of the Cape Verdean armed forces have turned to combatting international drug trafficking. In 2007, together with the Cape Verdean Police, they carried out Operation Flying Launch (Operacão Lancha Voadora), a successful operation to put an end to a drug trafficking group which smuggled cocaine from Colombia to the Netherlands and Germany using the country as a reorder point. The operation took more than three years, being a secret operation during the first two years, and ended in 2010. In 2016, Cape Verdean Armed Forces were involved in the Monte Tchota massacre, a green-on-green incident that resulted in 11 deaths.
Geography
The Cape Verde archipelago is in the Atlantic Ocean, approximately 570 kilometres (350 mi) off the western coast of the African continent, near Senegal, The Gambia, and Mauritania as well as part of the Macaronesia ecoregion. It lies between latitudes 14° and 18°N, and longitudes 22° and 26°W. The country is a horseshoe-shaped cluster of ten islands (nine inhabited) and eight islets, that constitute an area of 4033 km2 (1557 sq mi).
The islands are spatially divided into two groups:
The Barlavento Islands (windward islands): Santo Antão, São Vicente, Santa Luzia, São Nicolau, Sal, Boa Vista; and
The Sotavento Islands (leeward): Maio, Santiago, Fogo, Brava.
The largest island, both in size and population, is Santiago, which hosts the nation's capital, Praia, the principal urban agglomeration in the archipelago. Sal, Boa Vista, and Maio, are fairly flat, sandy, and dry; the other islands are generally rockier with more vegetation.
Physical geography and geology
Geologically, the islands are principally composed of igneous rocks, with volcanic structures and pyroclastic debris comprising the majority of the archipelago's total volume. The volcanic and plutonic rocks are distinctly basic; the archipelago is a soda-alkaline petrographic province, with a petrologic succession similar to that found in other Macaronesian islands. The islands lie on a bathymetric swell known as the Cape Verde Rise. The rise is one of the largest protuberances in the world's oceans, rising 2.2 kilometres (1.4 miles) in a semi-circular region of 1200 km2 (460 sq mi), associated with a rise of the geoid.
Magnetic anomalies identified in the vicinity of the archipelago indicate that the structures forming the islands date back 125–150 million years: the islands date from 8 million (in the west) to 20 million years (in the east). The oldest exposed rocks occurred on Maio and the northern peninsula of Santiago and are 128–131 million-year-old pillow lavas. The first stage of volcanism in the islands began in the early Miocene and reached its peak at the end of this period when the islands reached their maximum sizes.
Historical volcanism (within human settlement) has been restricted to Fogo. Pico do Fogo, the largest active volcano in the region, erupted in 2014. It has an eight-kilometre-diameter (five-mile) caldera, the rim of which is at an elevation of 1,600 metres (5,249 feet) and an interior cone that rises to 2,829 metres (9,281 feet) above sea level. The caldera resulted from subsidence, following the partial evacuation (eruption) of the magma chamber, along a cylindrical column from within the magma chamber (at a depth of 8 kilometres (5 miles)).
Extensive salt flats are found on Sal and Maio. On Santiago, Santo Antão, and São Nicolau, arid slopes give way in places to sugarcane fields or banana plantations spread along the base of towering mountains. Ocean cliffs have been formed by catastrophic debris landslides.
Climate
Cape Verde's climate is milder than that of the African mainland because the surrounding sea moderates temperatures, and cold Atlantic currents produce an arid atmosphere. Conversely, the islands do not receive the upwelling (cold streams) that affect the West African coast, so the air temperature is cooler than in Senegal, but the sea is warmer. Because of the relief of some islands, such as Santiago with its steep mountains, the islands can have orographically induced precipitation, allowing rich woods and luxuriant vegetation to grow where the humid air condenses, soaking the plants, rocks, soil, logs, moss, etc. On the higher islands and somewhat wetter islands, the climate is suitable for the development of dry monsoon forests and laurel forests. Cape Verde lies in the Cape Verde Islands dry forests ecoregion. Average temperatures range from 22 °C (72 °F) in February to 27 °C (80.6 °F) in September. Cape Verde is part of the Sahelian semi-arid belt, with nothing like the rainfall levels of nearby West Africa. It rains irregularly between August and October, with frequent brief heavy downpours. A desert is usually defined as terrain that receives less than 250 mm (9.8 in) of annual rainfall. Sal's total of 145 mm (5.7 in) confirms this classification. Most of the year's rain falls in September.
Because of the infrequent occurrence of rainfall where not mountainous, the landscape is so arid that less than two percent of it is arable. The archipelago can be divided into four broad ecological zones – arid, semiarid, sub-humid and humid, according to altitude and average annual rainfall ranging from less than 100 millimetres (3.9 inches) in the arid areas of the coast as in the Deserto de Viana (67 millimetres (2.6 inches) in Sal Rei) to more than 1,000 millimetres (39 inches) in the humid mountain. Most rainfall precipitation is due to condensation of the ocean mist. In some islands, like Santiago, the wetter climate of the interior and the eastern coast contrasts with the drier one on the south/southwest coast.
Western Hemisphere-bound hurricanes often have their early beginnings near the Cape Verde Islands. These Cape Verde hurricanes can become very intense as they cross warm Atlantic waters. The average hurricane season has about two Cape Verde-type hurricanes, which are usually the largest and most intense storms of the season because they often have plenty of warm open ocean over which to develop before encountering land. The five largest Atlantic tropical cyclones on record have been Cape Verde-type hurricanes. Most of the longest-lived tropical cyclones in the Atlantic basin are Cape Verde hurricanes.
Since 1851 the islands have been twice struck by hurricanes: in 1892 and in 2015 (Hurricane Fred, the easternmost hurricane ever to form in the Atlantic).
According to the president of Nauru, in 2011, Cape Verde was ranked the eighth most endangered nation due to flooding from climate change. In 2023, UN Secretary-General António Guterres arrived in Cabo Verde to raise concerns about climate change. He said that the country is on the frontlines of the existential crisis generated by climate disruptions and that world leaders need to take action to address the climate crisis. Cabo Verde is a leader in renewable energy in sub-Saharan Africa. As of 2023, 20% of its energy comes from renewable sources, and the goal is to increase that to 50% by 2030. In 2023, Portugal signed an agreement to forgive €140 million of Cape Verde's debt in exchange for the country investing in environmental projects. This agreement is one of the first debt-for-nature swaps in Africa.
Biodiversity
Cape Verde's isolation has resulted in the islands having several endemic species, particularly birds and reptiles, many of which are endangered by human development. Endemic birds include Alexander's swift (Apus alexandri), Bourne's heron (Ardea purpurea bournei), the Raso lark (Alauda razae), the Cape Verde warbler (Acrocephalus brevipennis), and the Iago sparrow (Passer iagoensis). The islands are also an important breeding area for seabirds including the Cape Verde shearwater. Reptiles include the Cape Verde giant gecko (Tarentola gigas).
Forest cover is around 11% of the total land area, equivalent to 45,720 hectares (ha) of forest in 2020, up from 15,380 ha in 1990. In 2020, naturally regenerating forest covered 13,680 ha and planted forest covered 32,040 ha. For the year 2015, 100% of the forest area was reported to be under public ownership.
Administrative divisions
Cape Verde is divided into 22 municipalities (concelhos) and subdivided into 32 parishes (freguesias), based on the religious parishes that existed during the colonial period:
Economy
Cape Verde's notable economic growth and improvement in living conditions despite a lack of natural resources have garnered international recognition, with other countries and international organisations often providing development aid. Since 2007, the UN has classified it as a developing nation rather than a least developed country.
Cape Verde has few natural resources. Only five of the ten main islands (Santiago, Santo Antão, São Nicolau, Fogo, and Brava) normally support significant agricultural production, and over 90% of all food consumed is imported. Mineral resources include salt, pozzolana (a volcanic rock used in cement production), and limestone. Its small number of wineries making Portuguese-style wines have traditionally focused on the domestic market, but have recently met with some international acclaim.
The economy is service-oriented, with commerce, transport, and public services accounting for more than 70% of the GDP. Although nearly 35% of the population lives in rural areas, agriculture and fishing contribute only about 9% of GDP. Light manufacturing accounts for most of the remainder. Fish and shellfish are plentiful, and small quantities are exported. Cape Verde has cold storage and freezing facilities and fish processing plants in Mindelo, Praia, and on Sal. Expatriate Cape Verdeans contribute an amount estimated at 20% of GDP to the domestic economy through remittances.
Despite having few natural resources and being semi-desert, the country has the highest living standards in the region and has attracted thousands of immigrants of different nationalities.
Since 1991, the government has pursued market-oriented economic policies, including an open welcome to foreign investors and a far-reaching privatization programme. It established as top development priorities the promotion of a market economy and the private sector; the development of tourism, light manufacturing industries, and fisheries; and the development of transport, communications, and energy facilities. From 1994 to 2000 about $407 million in foreign investments were made or planned, of which 58% were in tourism, 17% in industry, 4% in infrastructure, and 21% in fisheries and services.
In 2011, a wind farm was built on four islands that supplies about 30% of the electricity of the country.
As host to the ECOWAS Regional Centre for Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency, inaugurated in 2010, Cape Verde had planned to lead by example by becoming entirely reliant on renewable energy sources by 2025. This policy was consistent with the host of documents adopted in 2015 paving the way to more sustainable development, including Cape Verde's Transformational Agenda to 2030, its National Renewable Energy Plan and its Low Carbon and Climate-resilient Development Strategy. Two years later, these were followed by a Strategic Plan for Sustainable Development, 2017–2021. Since then, Cape Verde has pushed back this goal, aiming for 50% of energy produced by renewable sources by 2030 and 100% by 2050.
Between 2000 and 2009, real GDP increased on average by over 7% a year, well above the average for sub-Saharan countries and faster than most small island economies in the region. Strong economic performance was bolstered by one of the fastest-growing tourism industries in the world, as well as by substantial capital inflows that allowed Cape Verde to build up national currency reserves to the current 3.5 months of imports. Unemployment has been falling rapidly, and the country is on track to achieve most of the UN Millennium Development Goals – including halving its 1990 poverty level. In 2007, Cape Verde joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) and in 2008 the country graduated from Least Developed Country (LDC) to Middle Income Country (MIC) status.