Praia's story runs from Ribeira Grande — the first European city in the tropics and the Atlantic's first slave port — to the barracks where Portugal handed over power in 1975. Three days of star forts, pillories, tabanka brotherhoods and Cabral.
Built 1587-1593 after Francis Drake sacked Ribeira Grande twice, this star fort sits 120 m above the bay with cannon still aimed seaward. Restored in 2015; ramparts, cisterns and powder magazine, open 09:00-17:00 daily.
Rua Banana's single row of thatched stone houses dates to the 1460s, the oldest surviving colonial street anywhere in the tropics. Two minutes downhill stands the 1520 marble pelourinho, where enslaved Africans were whipped and auctioned.
Begun in 1556 and only finished in 1700, the cathedral of Ribeira Grande was the largest church in Portuguese West Africa until the French corsair Jacques Cassard burned it in 1712. Excavated nave, side chapels and bishops' tombs remain.
Consecrated around 1495, this is the oldest colonial church still standing anywhere. The Gothic Rosário chapel keeps its ribbed vault and the floor slabs of 16th-century merchants; the parish still says Sunday Mass in Kriolu at 09:00.
The 1878 hilltop fort guarding Praia's harbour later held political prisoners under Salazar's Estado Novo. Reopened as a cultural space in 2014, its ramparts show exactly why the Plateau was laid out as a defensible grid above the sea.
The 19th-century Portuguese barracks on the Plateau's western edge is where the colonial garrison stood down on 5 July 1975 and the flag of independent Cabo Verde was first raised. Still an active army headquarters today.
The 1894 palace built for Portugal's governors served as the presidential residence until 2005 and now holds national archive exhibitions and the Ildo Lobo cultural centre — tiled staircase, period rooms and rotating shows on independence.
The bronze of Amílcar Cabral — PAIGC founder, agronomist and strategist of the liberation war, assassinated in Conakry in January 1973 — stands before the National Assembly in Achada de Santo António, plaques carrying his lines on culture as resistance.
Set in a colonial house in Assomada, this museum documents the tabanka: the mutual-aid brotherhoods that enslaved Santiaguenses built to buy each other's freedom and bury their dead. Drums, flags, thrones and film of the June processions.
North of Assomada, the Boa Entrada baobab measures over 20 m around and is reckoned at more than 500 years old — a living witness to the plantation valley below, where runaway communities hid in the ravines above Ribeira da Barca.
The Rebelados broke with the Catholic Church in 1941 rather than accept its Portuguese-ordered reforms, and still farm this hamlet without electricity or state schooling. Visits are arranged through a village elder, with drumming and the schism explained.
Praia's 1902 parish church anchors the walk down from the Plateau into Várzea, the workers' and servants' quarter laid out in the 1860s. Lanes of one-storey sobrados, the old customs stores and the Fontinha wash-house survive between newer blocks.