Praia, March 3, 2025 (Lusa) - Cabo Verde has set a new record by welcoming around 1.2 million guests in 2024, according to preliminary figures released to Lusa on Monday by the president of the archipelago's Tourism Institute.
"The estimate points to 1.2 million," said Jair Fernandes, in an interview with Lusa, indicating that the numbers should continue to grow, reflecting the preference for Cabo Verde, especially among European tourists.
The president of the Tourism Institute ‘confidently’ believes that the record will be broken again in 2025, thanks to the introduction of Cabo Verde on the routes of the low-cost airline Easyjet - which currently flies only to the island of Sal, but may have connections to other islands.
"We have the possibility of having Easyjet on the islands of Santiago and São Vicente in the coming months, demonstrating that this can be the immediate path to deconcentrating" tourism, taking it to all nine islands, in conjunction with new domestic connections.
The cheaper international airlines will carry "another tourism profile, completely different" from the resort-based sun and beach offer, which currently accounts for the majority of the archipelago's tourist revenue and is centred on the islands of Sal and Boa Vista.
With ‘low cost’ airlines, Cabo Verde expects tourism "with an impact on all the islands and on the local economy, with visitors looking for experiences in the destination", Jair Fernandes believes.
After arriving at international airports, foreign tourists will have internal connections to get around, thanks to the new state-owned company Linhas Aéreas de Cabo Verde, which has already been created on paper and which Jair Fernandes hopes to see implemented.
"A tourist who is in Sal and wants to go to the island of São Nicolau, or who is in Boa Vista and wants to go to the island of Fogo, is guaranteed this possibility through the introduction of Linhas Aéreas de Cabo Verde, and can go one day and come back the next," he said.
"This will make it possible to decentralise tourist activity from Sal and Boa Vista to the other islands," he said, in response to an analysis released by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) in February.
According to the document, only the islands of Sal and Boa Vista, which are home to international hotel chains, exceeded the 2019 tourist flow, while the rest are still below the visitor numbers recorded before Covid-19 broke out, according to the figures calculated by the IMF.
Jair Fernandes told Lusa that ‘marketing is being done’ to change the paradigm and that nature tourism "has seen exponential and noticeable growth, in Santo Antão, Fogo and Santiago" along with the cultural segment, with Santiago (Cidade Velha and Tarrafal) and São Vicente, "within a folkloric context that has Carnival as its star product".
Another novelty is the development of complementary accommodation, so that "tourists aren't confined to hotels and resorts and so that, whichever island they visit, they are guaranteed accommodation beforehand".
Cabo Verde is showing its diversity at the Berlin tourism fair this week, after having been present at Fitur (Spain) in January and before that the Lisbon tourism fair in March of last year.
"The other islands have had their growth, but in order to infer this accurately, we are working on statistical data and analyses," which we hope will show the results of the diversification strategy.
Tourism and related activities are the engine of growth for the Cabo Verdean economy, with projected revenues of over €500 million by 2024, representing more than 70% of exports, according to the same IMF report.
The archipelago's prime minister, Ulisses Correia e Silva, said at the end of January, at the Portugal - Cabo Verde summit in Lisbon, that the tourism sector ‘is far from saturated’, considering that it needs to be diversified beyond the traditional ‘sun and beach’ offer and focus on the different islands.
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