- Where
- Inside the caldera of Pico do Fogo, island of Fogo, Cabo Verde
- Coordinates
- 14.9710° N, 24.3670° W
- Biome
- High-altitude volcanic caldera floor; endemic Echium and Artemisia
- Elevation
- c. 1,700 m — the highest village in Cabo Verde
- The peak
- Pico do Fogo, generally given as 2,829 m; the highest point in the country
- The eruption
- 23 November 2014 – 8 February 2015
- Best visited
- November–June, outside the wetter and hazier months
Slept in a guest house built on top of the lava that destroyed the previous guest house, and the floor was warm through my shoes. Drank wine grown in ash, on ground that has taken this village more than once, made by people who were advised not to come back and came back. Nobody here talks about it as bravery. They talk about the soil.
The short answer
Chã das Caldeiras is a farming village on the floor of the caldera of Pico do Fogo, an active volcano on the island of Fogo in Cabo Verde. At roughly 1,700 metres it is the highest settlement in the country, ringed by an escarpment called the Bordeira that rises about a thousand metres above the caldera floor. Before 2014 around seven hundred people lived there, in two neighbourhoods, Bangaeira and Portela, founded in 1917 and 1920. The caldera holds Cabo Verde's only significant vineyards. An eruption beginning on 23 November 2014 and ending on 8 February 2015 buried both neighbourhoods under lava. Residents were evacuated, the area was designated high-risk, and part of the community returned and rebuilt, some of it on top of the new flow.
Why it's worth knowing
There is a straightforward reason to live inside a volcano, and it is not defiance.
Cabo Verde is a dry archipelago about 570 kilometres off West Africa, and most of it is hard farming. The floor of the Fogo caldera is not. Volcanic ash and weathered lava make soil of a quality that exists nowhere else in the country, and at 1,700 metres the air is cool enough to grow things the lowlands cannot. Vines, coffee, beans, apples. Chã is the only place in Cabo Verde producing wine in quantity, from grapes grown on volcanic ash at an altitude that makes it one of the higher vineyards in the Atlantic.
So the equation the people of Chã live with is unusually clean. The volcano is the only reason the ground is worth farming, and the volcano is the reason the farming is periodically destroyed. Eruption intervals are commonly cited at somewhere between twenty and fifty years, which means most people who live a full life in the caldera will see one.
In 2014 they saw one. The lava came slowly enough that nobody died, and thoroughly enough that the village, the school, the health unit opened the year before, the churches, the natural park headquarters and around 208 hectares of farmland went under it. The government prohibited reconstruction in the high-risk zone.
People came back anyway. Some built new houses directly on top of the cooled flow that had covered their old ones. The guest house that visitors stay in today sits on the 2014 lava, and the rock beneath it has not finished cooling — the floors are noticeably warm.
That is the entry, really. Not a story about danger, and not one about stubbornness. A story about a community that has run the numbers, in the only currency that matters on a dry island, and concluded that ground which feeds you between eruptions is worth the eruptions.
The field notes
November to February
The eruption began on 23 November 2014 and continued until 8 February 2015.
The Cape Verdean volcanologist Bruno Faria described its intensity as exceeding the 1995 eruption and approaching that of 1951, among the strongest recorded on the island. Work by the geologist José Madeira of the University of Lisbon and Instituto Dom Luiz put the total lava volume at between 100 and 125 million tonnes.
Lava covered around 520 hectares. It took the villages of Portela and Bangaeira, the school, a health unit that had opened in 2013, churches, the Pedra Brabo hotel and restaurant, the headquarters of the Fogo Natural Park, and roughly 208 hectares of farmland. Close to a thousand residents were evacuated. Photographs of the caldera taken before November 2014 show the two neighbourhoods as they stood; those houses are now under the flow.
Nobody was killed. Fogo's lava is slow — it destroys buildings and spares people, provided they leave, and they left.
Accounts of what happened next do not fully agree, and the disagreement is worth keeping. English-language reference sources record that the majority of inhabitants left the village after the eruption and that a few homes have since been rebuilt. Cabo Verdean tourism material and visitor accounts emphasise return and reconstruction, describing a community that rebuilt itself. Both can be true at different points in a decade, and this entry does not flatten them into one story.
Wine, at seventeen hundred metres, in ash
Viticulture on Fogo is traced in Cabo Verdean accounts to a nineteenth-century European settler known as the Count of Montrond, who introduced the vine to the caldera. Many residents of Chã trace their ancestry to him, and the surname Chã is common in the village; that ancestry is a local account, not a documented record.
The wine is the caldera's signature product: grapes grown on volcanic ash at around 1,700 metres, in a country with no other meaningful wine industry. The outer slopes of the island grow coffee, which is also prized.
The houses are worth looking at. The traditional form is the funco — round, thick stone walls under a conical roof — and reconstruction since 2014 has mixed those with cinderblock and volcanic rock. Visitors regularly describe the effect as lunar, which is fair, and as faintly yurt-like, which is stranger and also fair.
The mountain and its arithmetic
Pico do Fogo is a stratovolcano rising from the caldera floor. Its height is generally given as 2,829 metres, which makes it the highest point in Cabo Verde; some accounts give figures closer to 3,000 metres, and the discrepancy is not resolved here. The caldera around it is quoted as roughly 9 kilometres across in some accounts and 12 in others.
The Bordeira — the caldera rim — stands about a thousand metres above the floor on the northern to south-eastern side, an almost sheer wall enclosing the village.
Since Cabo Verde was settled in the 1500s there have been some 38 recorded eruptions on Fogo, of which around 11 occurred inside the caldera. The summit crater of the Pico itself has not erupted in over two centuries; the recent activity has come from secondary cones on the caldera floor, which is precisely why the village is exposed.
Climbing the Pico is the island's other draw — a hard ascent on loose ground, and a descent that is essentially a controlled slide through volcanic gravel.
Fogo from the air, September 2022: the Bordeira wall and Pico do Fogo above the green south flank.
Photograph: Martin Mergili · Fogo island in Cape Verde - Aerial View from South - September 2022 · CC BY 3.0
The caldera floor in March 2016, with the lava flows of 1995 and 2014–15.
Photograph: Franzfoto · Cha das Caldeiras - Krater am Pico do Fogo · CC BY-SA 3.0
A building in Portela buried by the 2014–15 lava, April 2017.
Photograph: Zinneke · Cha de Caldeira - destructions Pico de Fogo eruption 2014-15. --1 · CC BY-SA 3.0
Houses on the caldera floor beneath the Bordeira, March 2016.
Photograph: Franzfoto · Cha das Caldeiras - Kraterrand mit Häusern am Pico do Fogo · CC BY-SA 3.0
Portela (left) and Bangaeira (right) in February 2012, before the 2014–15 eruption buried them.
Photograph: Ji-Elle · Chã das Caldeiras-Deux villages (1) · CC BY-SA 3.0
- Sleep in the caldera. A day trip gets you the view and misses the point entirely.
- Put your hand flat on the floor of a house built on the new lava.
- Drink the wine where it is grown. It does not travel much and it should be drunk in sight of the vines.
- Climb the Pico if you are fit, and run the gravel back down, which is undignified and the best part. (Arrived at the bottom a little ahead of myself. The list arrived later, on its own, some way off.)
- Walk out to where the lava stopped and stand on the line.
A warm floor. Casa Marisa 2.0 was rebuilt on top of the 2014 flow, and the rock underneath is still giving up heat a decade later — enough that rooms can be stuffy and the floor is warm through a shoe. It is the most ordinary possible sensation delivered by the most extraordinary possible cause.
Tally, in the marginEveryone else had stopped noticing. I could not stop noticing.
Getting there
Fogo is one of the ten islands of Cabo Verde, an Atlantic archipelago roughly 570 kilometres west of Senegal. International flights land at Sal and Praia; from there domestic flights and inter-island ferries serve São Filipe, Fogo's main town.
From São Filipe to the caldera is a road climb of about an hour and a half by aluguer — the shared minibuses that function as public transport — or by hired car and driver. The road ascends the outer slope and enters through a gap in the Bordeira, and the arrival is the single best moment on the island: you come over the rim and the whole crater opens below with the cone standing in the middle of it.
Staying means small guesthouses in the village, several rebuilt since 2014. Facilities are simple, the village is deliberately off the public electricity grid, and food is local and good. Guides for the Pico ascent are arranged in the village or at the park information centre on the caldera floor.
Practical notes. Nights at 1,700 metres are cold, including in the tropics — bring layers, which visitors regularly fail to do. The climb is steep and loose, and takes most of a day. Cabo Verde's dry season runs roughly November to June; the bruma seca, a dusty Harmattan haze, can obscure views. There is no ATM in the village. And the volcano is monitored, but it is active: eruptions here are forecast in days, not years.
Mark this place
Common questions
Do people really live inside an active volcano at Chã das Caldeiras?
Yes. People live and farm on the floor of the caldera of Pico do Fogo, at about 1,700 metres, in the highest village in Cabo Verde. Before the 2014–15 eruption around seven hundred lived there, in the neighbourhoods of Portela and Bangaeira, which the lava buried; part of the community has since returned and rebuilt, and accounts differ on how many. The main draw is the soil: volcanic ash and weathered lava make the caldera floor the most fertile agricultural ground in a dry country.
What happened in the 2014 Fogo eruption?
The eruption began on 23 November 2014 and ended on 8 February 2015. Lava covered around 520 hectares, destroying homes in Portela and Bangaeira, the school, a health unit opened in 2013, churches, a hotel and the Fogo Natural Park headquarters, along with roughly 208 hectares of farmland. Close to a thousand people were evacuated. No one was killed.
Did people rebuild Chã das Caldeiras after the eruption?
In part, and accounts differ on how much. The government designated the area a high-risk zone and prohibited reconstruction there. Reference sources record that most inhabitants left and that some homes have since been rebuilt; Cabo Verdean tourism accounts emphasise a community that returned and rebuilt itself. Some houses stand directly on the cooled 2014 lava flow.
Is there really wine made inside the volcano?
Yes. Chã das Caldeiras is the only place in Cabo Verde producing wine in any quantity, from vines grown on volcanic ash at around 1,700 metres — one of the higher-altitude vineyards in the Atlantic. Coffee is grown on the island's outer slopes.
How high is Pico do Fogo?
It is generally given as 2,829 metres, making it the highest point in Cabo Verde. Some accounts give figures approaching 3,000 metres. The summit crater has not erupted in over two centuries; recent eruptions, including 2014, came from secondary cones on the caldera floor.
How often does Fogo erupt?
Roughly 38 eruptions have been recorded since the islands were settled in the 1500s, about 11 of them inside the caldera. Intervals between eruptions have run from about twenty to fifty years, which means most people who spend a life in the caldera can expect to experience one.
How do you get to Chã das Caldeiras?
Fly or take a ferry to São Filipe on Fogo, then travel about an hour and a half by road up the outer slope and through a gap in the caldera rim. Shared minibuses (aluguer) and hired cars with drivers both make the trip. There is no route in that does not involve the climb.
Is it safe to visit Chã das Caldeiras?
The volcano is actively monitored and eruptions are preceded by warning signs, but it is an active volcano. The US State Department describes Cabo Verde overall as generally safe for travellers, with elevated crime confined to the capital, Praia, on a different island. The practical risks on Fogo are altitude, cold nights and a demanding climb.