Stay Connected in Cape Verde

Connectivity in Cape Verde is workable but uneven, and that's the honest starting point. On the tourist islands, Sal and Boa Vista above all, you'll find 4G that handles WhatsApp calls, maps, and the occasional Netflix episode without much drama. Santiago and São Vicente get similar treatment around Praia and Mindelo. Step outside those zones, into the interior of Santo Antão or the quieter corners of Fogo, and signal gets patchy fast. Coverage thins quickly. What catches travelers off guard is the price gap: roaming from European carriers can be brutal here because Cape Verde sits outside most EU roaming agreements, despite the Portuguese ties. Check before you fly. The other surprise is hotel WiFi, which tends to be slower than your mobile data once you're on a local network. Plan mobile-first. Treat WiFi as backup, and you'll dodge the frustration that hits travelers who assumed otherwise.

Two carriers run the show in Cape Verde: CVMovel (the incumbent, owned by CV Telecom) and Unitel T+, the challenger. CVMovel tends to have the broader rural footprint, useful if you're hiking Santo Antão's ribeiras or driving the interior of Santiago. Unitel T+ generally offers slightly better speeds and pricing in urban areas, Praia and Mindelo above all, with aggressive data bundles aimed at younger users. Both run 4G/LTE across the populated zones of all nine inhabited islands. Speeds hit 15-40 Mbps in town. Out in remote areas, you drop to 3G or edge. 5G has been rolled out in limited pockets of Praia and on Sal. Don't plan around it. Coverage gets properly spotty on inter-island ferries and on the windward coasts of Santo Antão and Fogo. Fair warning. International calls from Cape Verde numbers are expensive on prepaid plans, so most travelers stick to WhatsApp or Signal for voice. Both carriers sell tourist-friendly data packages at the airports right now.

Hotel and resort WiFi across Sal and Boa Vista tends to run on open or shared-password networks, which means anyone else on that network can potentially see unencrypted traffic. Airport WiFi at Amílcar Cabral and Praia is similarly open. Travelers are targets. The assumption is you're doing banking, checking work email, or logging into accounts from a device that won't be there next week, low risk of getting caught for whoever's snooping. The practical fix is a VPN. It encrypts everything between your device and the wider internet so the local network sees only scrambled traffic. NordVPN is one solid option, with servers in Portugal and Spain that give decent speeds for Cape Verde given the undersea cable routing. Turn it on before connecting to any public network, leave it on for banking and email. Then forget about it.