Cape Verde’s Dual Tourism Economy: Budget Backpackers vs Luxury Seekers

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Cape Verde closed 2024 with roughly 1.2 million visitors, a record for an archipelago of just over 500,000 residents, according to Jair Fernandes, president of the Cabo Verde Tourism Institute, citing a Trading Economics report of 2025. Fernandes told the Lusa news agency the estimate would “continue to grow,” and he was right as arrivals kept climbing through 2025.

That single figure hides two separate economies. On Sal and Boa Vista, chartered flights land, coaches meet passengers at the gate, and guests check into resort compounds run by Spanish and Portuguese hotel groups. Many will not leave the property all week. On Santo Antão and São Vicente, a different traveller arrives on a domestic flight or a ferry, carries a pack rather than a suitcase, and books a room through a family-run guesthouse rather than a tour operator. Both travellers count as tourists in the government’s statistics. Only one of them keeps most of their money inside the country.

Cape Verde’s tourism strategy has chased arrival numbers for two decades without building the mechanisms to keep a fair share of the spending onshore. Until the government ties resort licences to local sourcing, hiring and water use, the record visitor counts will keep flattering a GDP figure that most Cape Verdeans experience only at a distance.

A Record Year, Read Closely

Tourism drove Cape Verde’s economy to 7.3% GDP growth in 2024, its strongest expansion since the pandemic.

The sector’s weight in the national accounts is not new: the World Travel & Tourism Council put travel and tourism’s direct contribution at 17.8% of GDP in 2017, with a total contribution, including indirect and induced effects, of 44.9%.

A University of Lisbon study on Santiago island’s tourism master plan puts the sector’s gross added value at more than 20% of GDP even when the pandemic years are excluded.

The government wants more of the same. Former tourism director-general Carlos Jorge Anjos set a target of 3.15 million arrivals by 2030, which he said would create more than 30,000 jobs and roughly CVE 4.4 billion (about $47 million) in tax revenue.

Most of those future visitors will arrive on package deals: 87.1% of trips in the most recent National Statistics Institute survey were organised by tour operators, with an average stay of 8.7 days and daily spending of 9,014 escudos, about €82. 95% of visitors said they were travelling purely for holidays, a figure that tells its own story about how narrow the country’s tourism product still is.

Sal and Boa Vista Run the Package Machine

Sal and Boa Vista are the two islands doing the heavy lifting. Tourism “remains concentrated” on both, driven mainly by operator-organised trips, while Santiago stands out for independently arranged visits.

Walk along Santa Maria beach on Sal or Praia de Chaves on Boa Vista and the hotel names read like a European portfolio: Riu, Meliá, Hilton, Occidental and Horizon Group properties line the sand, most offering all-inclusive packages sold through UK and continental European tour operators.

Foreign capital built this model. By the mid-2010s, Cape Verde was drawing more than €1 billion a year in foreign investment, much of it into Sal’s resort pipeline, with UK buyers purchasing units in schemes such as Dunas Beach as pension-linked rental investments rather than as holiday homes.

Macau Daily Times notes that the UK has historically supplied the largest single share of visitors, at around a quarter of arrivals in the mid-2010s, followed by Germany, France and Portugal.

Easyjet’s 2024 entry to the Sal route, confirmed by the Tourism Institute, signals that the low-cost segment is now joining the charter operators in feeding this island’s beach-resort economy.

Santo Antão and São Vicente Draw a Different Crowd

Ninety minutes across the water sits a different Cape Verde. Santo Antão has no airport; every visitor arrives via São Vicente’s Cesária Évora International Airport, then crosses by ferry to Porto Novo, a journey that costs around €8 each way and takes roughly an hour.

There is no resort strip waiting. Trekkers head instead for the Vale de Paúl, a volcanic crater that drops from 1,400 metres through terraced sugarcane fields, or the coastal path between Cruzinha and Ponta do Sol, which passes through Fontainhas. This cliffside village has picked up international recognition for its setting.

This is the segment readers usually mean when they ask about the “real” Cape Verde. Accommodation runs from guesthouses to small family-run pousadas, tours are often booked locally rather than through international operators, and spending happens in cafés, aluguer taxis and market stalls rather than at a resort front desk.

Independent travellers arriving through Santiago show a similar pattern, booking their own transport and accommodation rather than a package. It is a smaller economy in volume, but a larger share of it reaches local hands.

Where the Resort Money Actually Goes

This is where Cape Verde’s dual model runs into trouble. Sal and Boa Vista are desert islands with limited fresh water, and large resort compounds have drawn on supplies that residents rely on, with some local connections reportedly interrupted so hotels could keep guests supplied.

Foreign groups manage most hotels on both islands, and because guests pay upfront for an all-inclusive package, they have little financial reason to spend outside the resort gate. Money that should reach nearby restaurants, taxi drivers, and market vendors instead stays inside the compound. The same reporting links the model to a wider pattern of young Cape Verdeans leaving smaller, less-visited islands for work, since tourism jobs cluster on Sal and Boa Vista rather than spreading across the archipelago.

None of this shows up in the headline arrival figures the Tourism Institute releases each year: a visitor count and a GDP percentage measure activity, not distribution. Cape Verde can post a record 1.2 million arrivals and 7.3% growth in the same year that a hotel worker in Boa Vista cannot get consistent tap water, and both facts will be true at once.

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The RCA Argument

What Cape Verde Could Change

Three changes would shift real income, not just visitor totals, towards Cape Verdean households. First, Praia could tie resort operating licences to minimum local procurement and hiring quotas, the kind of leakage-reduction rule several Caribbean governments have used to force all-inclusive chains to buy food and staff locally rather than import both. Second, a resort water levy, ring-fenced for desalination and community supply upgrades on Sal and Boa Vista, would address the most visible resident complaint directly rather than leaving it to travel blogs and forums to raise. Third, the government’s own arrival target gives it leverage: if Praia wants 3.15 million visitors by 2030, it can direct some of that projected growth, through airlift incentives and marketing spend, toward Santo Antão, Fogo and Brava, islands that already have demand from independent travellers but lack the infrastructure to convert it into jobs.

Formalising the guesthouse and small-tour sector on the backpacker islands matters too. Much of that spending currently sits entirely outside the tax net. Bringing it in would not slow the sector down; it would let the government measure, and eventually reinvest in, the very model that already sends a higher share of tourist spending into local hands.

Cape Verde does not need to choose between the two economies it has built. But it does need to stop treating one as the whole story. The next tourism minister who wants a real legacy will not be the one who breaks the 1.2 million mark again; it will be the one who can say how much of that money actually stayed.

What This Means for Africa’s and Nigeria’s Tourism Sector

Cape Verde’s split between package resorts and independent travel is not a Cape Verdean problem alone; it previews the choice facing every African coastal destination now courting European charter airlines and hotel investors. Kenya’s coast, Zanzibar, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Nigeria’s own Lagos and Cross River coastlines are all pursuing the same all-inclusive, high-volume model that built Sal and Boa Vista. Cape Verde shows both what that model can deliver,  a 7.3% GDP boost in a single year, and what it can cost, in strained water systems and resort spending that never reaches a local till.

For Nigeria specifically, the lesson sits closer to home than it might appear. Nigeria’s own tourist arrivals and revenue remain far below their 2019 levels, and the country is still deciding how to position emerging coastal and heritage sites such as Obudu Ranch and the Cross River corridor. Cape Verde’s experience argues for building local-sourcing and community-benefit rules into any resort concession from day one, rather than retrofitting them after foreign operators have already locked in the supply chain. It also argues for treating independent, budget-conscious travellers, including the diaspora segment Nigeria is actively courting, as a distinct market worth its own infrastructure, not an afterthought to the package trade.

Cape Verde is one island story in a continent full of them. Explore RCA’s continuing coverage of how African destinations are building, and sometimes mismanaging, their tourism economies, from Botswana’s high-value model to the fight over Africa’s missing flight routes.

 

FAQs

1. Is Cape Verde better for a luxury holiday or a budget trip?

Both, depending on which island you choose. Sal and Boa Vista are built for all-inclusive luxury and package holidays, while Santo Antão, São Vicente and Santiago suit independent, budget-conscious travel far better.

2. How many tourists visit Cape Verde each year?

Cape Verde recorded an estimated 1.2 million visitors in 2024, a national record, according to the Cabo Verde Tourism Institute.

3. Which Cape Verde island is best for hiking and backpacking?

Santo Antão, reached by ferry from São Vicente, offers the archipelago’s best-known trekking routes, including the Vale de Paúl and the Cruzinha-to-Ponta do Sol coastal trail.

4. Do all-inclusive resorts in Cape Verde benefit the local economy?

Only partially. Independent reporting suggests most resort hotels on Sal and Boa Vista are foreign-owned and managed; guests pre-pay for everything, and spending tends to stay inside the resort rather than reaching local businesses.

5. How much does tourism contribute to Cape Verde’s economy?

Estimates vary by year and methodology, but the World Travel & Tourism Council put tourism’s total contribution to GDP at 44.9% in 2017, and a 2024 GDP growth rate of 7.3% was driven largely by the sector.