AT A GLANCE
Why go?
Ribeira da Cidade is the local name for the seasonal watercourse that runs through old Cidade Velha on Santiago island — the final stretch of the Ribeira Grande de Santiago, one of Cape Verde's few valley streams and the very feature that gave the first European colonial town in the tropics its original name, Ribeira Grande.↗↗↗
Rising high in the central mountains near Monte Tchota and gathering through groves of baobab, mango and former sugar land, it reaches the coast at the bay beneath the Royal Fortress of São Filipe. Following it from the old quarter to the Atlantic takes you straight through the living heart of a UNESCO World Heritage site.↗↗↗
A riverbed that named a town
In a semi-arid archipelago, water is the reason people settle — and the Ribeira Grande was the reason this place became a town at all. Founders arrived in the 1460s to a valley whose stream, fed by the island's interior, greened the land enough to support a port and the first European outpost south of the Sahara. The settlement took the watercourse's own name, Ribeira Grande, and grew wealthy as a hub of the Atlantic slave trade and a provisioning stop for ocean navigation. Centuries of pirate raids — Francis Drake in 1585 among them — and a devastating French attack in 1712 emptied the town; the capital moved east to Praia and the abandoned core became Cidade Velha, "Old City." The stream, though, kept running to the same bay.
