Festival de Ribeira Grande de Santiago

Cidade Velha, founded from 1460 as Ribeira Grande de Santiago and recognised as the first European colonial settlement in the tropics, earned UNESCO World Heritage status in 2009 for its surviving churches, royal fortress and sixteenth-century Pillory Square. In its inaugural 2025 edition, curated by historian Antonio Correia e Silva, a new Festival de Recriacao Historica re-enacted Spanish navigator Juan Sebastian de Elcano's 1522 passage through the port during the first circumnavigation of the globe.

Ribeira Grande de Santiago, later renamed Cidade Velha in the late eighteenth century, holds a genuinely foundational place in Cape Verdean and wider Atlantic history: founded from 1460 onward, it was the first European colonial settlement built in the tropics anywhere, and through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it served as a key port of call in the maritime trade routes connecting Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean and Portugal's wider colonial network, before eventually being surpassed by Praia as the country's capital.