Cabo Verde

Arrive at Praia on Santiago, the largest island and the seat of government, and settle into the Plateau, the colonial grid on the bluff above the harbour. The afternoon walks it: the Presidential Palace, the Ethnographic Museum, the Praça Alexandre Albuquerque, and then down into the Sucupira market, a vast, loud, entirely unsentimental African market that is the best possible correction to any preconception about what this country looks like. Dinner and a first cachupa.

West along the coast to Cidade Velha, founded in 1462 as the first European town in the tropics and now UNESCO-listed: the pillory in the square, the ruined cathedral, the rua Banana, and the Fortaleza Real de São Filipe on the ridge above, looking down on the bay that was the hinge of the Atlantic slave trade. In the afternoon, over the mountains through Assomada and the Serra Malagueta to the north of the island, where the country is green and agricultural and nobody stops.

The short flight west to Fogo lands beneath a volcano that is the entire island. São Filipe is one of the handsomest towns in the country: two-storey sobrado merchant houses with wooden balconies and interior courtyards, stacked on a black-sand cliff above the sea, with the cone permanently behind them. The afternoon is spent walking it, with the municipal market, the old Portuguese quarter and sunset from the clifftop over the Atlantic, and Brava lying across the channel.

Up into the volcano. The road climbs to the caldera rim at 1,600 metres and drops through a gap in the wall onto the crater floor, which is a black plain of ash and lava with a thousand people living on it. The 2014 eruption buried Portela and Bangaeira; the families rebuilt on top of the flow, and you walk it with someone who did. The afternoon takes in the vineyards planted in ash, the coffee, the manecom wine and the community cooperative, and you sleep inside the caldera.

Out before light for the cone: 1,100 metres of ascent in about three hours on ash and rock to the crater rim at 2,829 metres, the highest point in the country, with the whole caldera and the ocean beneath and the sulphur still venting from the 2014 vent below. The descent is the part people remember, forty minutes of running down a scree slope in enormous strides. Back down to São Filipe in the afternoon, sore and pleased.

The flight north to São Vicente, usually via Praia, and into Mindelo, which is the country's cultural capital and knows it. The afternoon is the town: the colonial waterfront and the Torre de Belém replica, the fish and fruit markets, the Praça Nova where the whole town walks in the evening, and the Cesária Évora house. Then dinner, and out to one of the small live-music places off the square, where the morna and coladeira start late and are played for the room rather than for visitors.

The morning ferry crosses the channel in an hour to Porto Novo, and then comes one of the great roads: the Estrada da Corda, cobbled by hand, climbing from the dry south over the spine of the island to 1,600 metres at the Cova crater and dropping into the green north. You stop at the rim to look down into Cova, a farmed volcanic crater with its floor under cultivation, then descend into Ribeira Grande and settle in on the north coast for three nights.

The best walking day in Cabo Verde. A vehicle takes you back up to the Cova rim, and from there the route drops the whole length of the Paul Valley to the sea: five hours of continuous descent through terraces of sugarcane, banana, coffee, mango and yam stacked on both walls, past aqueducts and hamlets linked only by cobbled paths. You stop at a trapiche where cane is still crushed by an ox-driven press and distilled into grogue in a copper still, and taste both it and the ponche.

The coast walk. From Ponta do Sol an old cobbled path traverses the cliff face above the Atlantic, and around the first headland Fontainhas appears: a green spur with a village built on it and a few hundred metres of air below. On to Corvo, then the longer stretch to Cruzinha da Garça, three to four hours in all with the ocean below the whole way and a vehicle waiting at the far end. The afternoon is free in Ribeira Grande or Ponta do Sol.

The morning ferry back across the channel to Mindelo, timed with margin against your flight. If the day allows, we take the road up Monte Verde for the view over the whole island and the channel you have just crossed, or spend a last hour in the market. Then the transfer to São Pedro airport. Cabo Verde connects to Lisbon, Boston and increasingly to West Africa, and we are glad to build a Sal or Boa Vista beach finish, or our Senegal & The Gambia expedition, onto the end.