Cape Verde may have been the second smallest nation in the World Cup, but it certainly made a huge impact in this tournament. The African island country of just over half a million inhabitants faced the greats of football in the 2026 World Cup.

And from the beginning, the tournament debutants became the center of attention.

There was the heroic performance of goalkeeper Vozinha, with which they achieved their first point in a World Cup against Spain.

They also experienced the excitement of scoring their first World Cup goals against Uruguay.

And there was a great goal from Sidny Lopes Cabral, with which they were about to create the biggest surprise of the competition against Argentina.

The Cape Verde team had never participated in the largest football event on the planet, something that was seen as an unattainable dream in this small archipelago located more than 500 kilometers from the coast of Senegal, at the western end of Africa.

And his exploits in the tournament sparked global interest in this country with a young but fascinating history.

We rescue some of the distinctive elements that, apart from football, make Cape Verde unique.

1. Bats populated it until the arrival of Portugal

With a total area of ​​4,000 km2, Cape Verde consists of ten islands, of which nine are inhabited.

Its only endemic species is the gray long-eared bat, which since ancient times dominated the archipelago without interbreeding with other mammals until the arrival of the first humans in the 15th century.

After making landfall in 1456, according to historical records, the Portuguese founded Ribeira Grande on the southern island of Santiago. This town today is called Cidade Velha and is a few kilometers from Praia, the capital and most populated city in the country.

Portugal named the islands Cape Verde after the closest point to continental Africa: the homonymous peninsula where Dakar is located today on the central coast of Senegal.

The archipelago is divided into two groups: the windward islands (Santo Antão, São Vicente, Santa Luzia, São Nicolau, Sal and Boa Vista) and the leeward islands (Maio, Santiago, Fogo and Brava).

Of them, only Santa Luzia remains uninhabited and is a nature reserve.

2. It channeled the slave trade between Africa and America

Due to its strategic location between Africa and America, Cape Verde was consolidated in the 16th century as a main hub in the transatlantic slave trade, which lasted for more than 300 years.

It is estimated that about 3,000 slaves from the African continent were sold each year in Cape Verde bound for Europe and America.

Some of them stayed in the small archipelago to work in the salt mines and the incipient cotton plantations destined for Portugal.

The inheritance of the slave trade decisively marked its demographics, with a majority mulatto population resulting from mixing between Africans and Europeans - especially Portuguese -, a pattern confirmed by genetic studies.

Thus, although the official language is Portuguese, its inhabitants also speak Cape Verdean Creole (a mixture of Portuguese and African languages) with nine variants, one for each inhabited island.

The colonial heritage also dominates religion: 72.5% of the population is Catholic, according to the CIA yearbook The World Factbook.

3. It only has 500,000 inhabitants, minus half of the tourists it receives in a year

The wide distance between islands, its small territory - it occupies less than a fifth of El Salvador, which is the smallest country in Latin America - and barely 11% of arable surface among extensive territories of volcanic rock, among other factors, have limited the growth of the population of Cape Verde during the last five and a half centuries.

The World Bank estimated its population at 524,000 inhabitants in 2024, less than half of the 1.2 million tourists who visited the archipelago that same year, according to official data.

Tourism is, in fact, Cape Verde's main economic driver with a weight of approximately a quarter of GDP, according to several sources, including the US Department of Commerce.

The Cape Verdeans who remain in their country are also fewer than those in the diaspora, two million according to the government's estimate in 2023 - the majority in Portugal and the United States - although the figure has been questioned due to the lack of exhaustive studies.

4. It is one of the most stable democracies in Africa

Portugal transformed Cape Verde's status from a colony to an overseas province in 1951, a change that did not satisfy the growing aspirations of its citizens for real autonomy.

In the 1950s and 1960s, local leaders such as Amílcar Cabral joined Guinea-Bissau in a bloody liberation war against the metropolis that culminated in independence on July 5, 1975.

The country remained under a single-party system until 1990, when the Movement for Democracy (MPD) emerged and the door to multipartyism was opened with the first plural elections in January 1991.

Since then, Cape Verde has maintained a peaceful and stable political life, with alternation between parties in power and an institutional system that includes an elected president, prime minister, National Assembly and a Supreme Court of Justice.

The alternation of power was consolidated in 2021 when the current president, the center-left opposition José Maria Neves, won the elections after ten years of dominance by the center-right MPD party.

5. There are no rivers or fresh water, but there is a dangerous active volcano

With an extremely dry climate, the archipelago does not have rivers, lakes or important freshwater sources, so the drinking water that reaches homes comes entirely from desalination plants.

It hardly rains, droughts are frequent and can last for years, which affects agricultural production and has caused food crises in the past.

The islands, formed by volcanic activity, present rugged, arid landscapes that are mostly inhospitable to agriculture: some are flat and covered with dunes, such as Sal, Boa Vista and Maio, while others stand out for their cliffs and steep reliefs, such as Santo Antão or São Nicolau.

The highest point in the country is Pico do Fogo, with 2,829 meters of altitude, the only active volcano in the archipelago.

Its most recent eruption, the longest in two and a half centuries, occurred between November 2014 and February 2015 with important consequences: it destroyed entire towns, forced the evacuation of a thousand inhabitants and left more than US$50 million in losses.

6. It has its own musical genres: the morna of Cesária Évora and the funaná

Native music is inseparable from daily life in Cape Verde and accompanies both popular festivals and family celebrations.

The most representative genre is the morna, recognized in 2019 by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity.

With a slow rhythm and melancholic tone, it evokes the feeling of saudade, nostalgia for the land or loved ones - especially among the diaspora - with sounds of guitars, cavaquinho, violin and light percussion.

The great ambassador of morna was Cesária Évora (1941-2011), the “barefoot diva” who brought this genre to some of the main stages in the world.

The other great indigenous genre of Cape Verde, funaná, presents a fast and danceable rhythm with notes of accordion and ferrinho.

*This article was originally published in October 2025 and updated during the 2026 World Cup.