Cape Verde island hopping by ferry: count the island nights, not just the crossings

The October 2026 sailing examples below illustrate the published route and accommodation choices at that time. They are dated examples, not departures offered for later travel dates.

A short ferry crossing can give a Cape Verde holiday a useful second base. A longer chain can also work, but only when the sailing dates leave you enough time to enjoy the islands between the boats. Drawing a neat line from Santiago to Boa Vista to Sal is the easy part. Persuading the departure calendar to follow your drawing is where the planning begins.

For a compact trip, São Vicente and Santo Antão make a much simpler ferry pairing than a journey across several islands. For a longer itinerary, build each sailing into the calendar before buying the accommodation, and put the final stay on the island from which your international flight leaves.

Here are two worked examples using CV Interilhas’ published departures reviewed on 21 October 2026. They are timetable models, not available-ticket quotes or a promise that the boats will operate unchanged.

The operator’s routes and schedules page contains several different planning tools: a date selector, a downloadable timetable and a table of journey durations. They do not answer the same question.

A duration tells you roughly how long a connection takes. It does not establish that a boat leaves on your chosen day, that the journey is direct, or that a ticket remains for sale. Start by selecting the actual departure date and finding the required direction in that day’s list.

That matters in the examples below. The calendar reviewed on 21 October listed a Boa Vista–Sal departure at 22:00 on Saturday 31 October, while Friday 30 October showed the reverse Sal–Boa Vista departure at 23:59. A generic weekly diagram is not a substitute for those dated entries.

The timing tools also differ slightly. The website’s duration matrix gives São Vicente–Santo Antão as 40 minutes, whereas the dated Barlavento timetable pairs an 08:00 departure with a 09:00 arrival. Use the full hour when planning that published sailing. Twenty invented minutes are not much help when they disappear before you reach the port.

The first example leaves São Vicente on Monday 26 October 2026 and returns on Wednesday 28 October. The calendar reviewed on 21 October listed both selected departures, and the downloadable timetable supplies their planned arrivals for its 11 October–24 November period.

This gives you arrival-day time, a full Tuesday without a ferry commitment and part of Wednesday before returning. It does not turn every hour between the boats into sightseeing: accommodation transfers, meals, luggage and the return check-in still need space.

CV Interilhas requires passenger check-in at least one hour before departure. For these sailings, that means 07:00 on Monday and 16:00 on Wednesday. The Wednesday outing therefore needs to finish early enough to get you back to the departure terminal by 16:00, rather than treating 17:00 as the time to arrive there. Passenger boarding rules.

For comparison, an 08:00 outward boat and 17:00 return on the same day would leave a scheduled seven hours from the 09:00 arrival to 16:00 return check-in, before local transfers. Choose the overnight stay if you want a full day on the island without watching the return-ferry clock. A day trip is a different experience, even when it visits the same island.

If your international flight is hypothetically on Friday 30 October from São Vicente, the Wednesday return puts two hotel nights on the departure island. That arrangement leaves Thursday there as part of the holiday, rather than promising that a same-day ferry and flight will line up. Those two nights are a planning choice, not a guarantee against every cancellation.

These times also have a season boundary. For 25 November 2026–7 January 2027, the next Barlavento timetable moves the Monday-to-Saturday morning departure from São Vicente to 07:00 and the afternoon return from Santo Antão to 16:00. Its Sunday pattern is different again. Do not carry the October example into a Christmas booking unchanged.

The second example uses the dated Tuesday 27 October, 14:00 Santiago–Boa Vista sailing, then the Saturday 31 October, 22:00 Boa Vista–Sal sailing. It deliberately stays on Boa Vista between the crossings instead of treating it as a brief stop on a through journey.

The published timing references put the first arrival at about 21:00 and the second at about 01:00 the following morning. The downloadable sheet and general duration table differ by five minutes on these legs, so these are approximate arrival times for planning accommodation, not exact transfer appointments.

The reward for this longer plan is three complete days on Boa Vista, Wednesday to Friday, plus much of Saturday before the 21:00 check-in deadline. The cost is four Boa Vista room nights, followed by an awkwardly timed arrival on Sal.

If you want a room immediately after reaching Sal around 01:00 on Sunday, reserve the Saturday-night room and arrange that late arrival with the property. A booking starting on Sunday normally means the room begins at that property’s Sunday check-in time; it is not a room for the early hours just after Saturday night.

With a hypothetical international departure from Sal on Monday 2 November, this model therefore uses six hotel nights after leaving Santiago: four on Boa Vista and two on Sal. Saturday’s boat journey crosses midnight, but it does not replace a full hotel night with a night of accommodation aboard.

Tickets can be bought online, at the operator’s ticket offices or through its official partners. They cannot be bought while entering the ship. Carry photo identification matching the ticket name, keep the ticket available through the journey and use the one-hour check-in deadline when arranging the ride to the terminal. CV Interilhas’ FAQ separately says it does not offer advance seat selection; that does not mean you should wait until boarding to buy the ferry ticket.

Choose your island combination around the experience you want. Two Santo Antão nights provide one full day free of ferry travel with a relatively compact return to São Vicente. The Santiago–Boa Vista–Sal example devotes more nights to the route and rewards that commitment with a longer Boa Vista stay. Add an island when the stay itself is worth the extra journey and hotel nights. Another line on the route map is less rewarding if you spend most of the visit getting ready to leave.

Before committing the hotels, select your actual travel dates in the operator’s calendar and buy the corresponding sailings. If the required departure is absent, remove that leg from the booked plan or change the dates; do not fill it in using the duration matrix. Keep the tickets and room-night calendar downloaded together. Read the operator’s published changes before each crossing, then adjust the next hotel arrival if the sailing changes. A connection on land is useful for that update; the saved plan remains readable on the boat.

For the flight home, keep the final island stay inside the trip rather than using the last ferry as an airport transfer. CV Interilhas’ passenger policy warns that schedule changes can affect connections to other services. A pleasant final day on the departure island is time you can actually use, while still giving the journey more room than a ferry-to-flight sprint.