Cape Verde increasingly popular with solo female travellers as tourism booms

Cape Verde has emerged as one of the fastest-growing destinations for solo female travellers, with The Lagoon Resort on the island of Sal, celebrating its 20th anniversary in 2027, is reporting a sharp rise in independent women booking holidays to the Atlantic archipelago.

The Lagoon Resort is part of a five-hotel collection of five-star Multi-award-winning Meliá Hotels on Sal, Cape Verde. previous guests of which have included Michelle Obama.

The shift comes as Cape Verde posts the strongest tourism figures in its history. Hotels across the ten-island nation welcomed a record 1,248,052 guests in 2025, a 6 per cent increase on 2024, alongside 6,120,204 overnight stays, up 8.3 per cent year on year, according to the National Statistics Institute (INE).

The final quarter of 2025 alone delivered 400,653 arrivals, the busiest three months ever recorded.

The United Kingdom remains the dominant source market, accounting for 29.3 per cent of non-resident arrivals and 33.5 per cent of overnight stays, ahead of Portugal, Germany, France and the Benelux countries.

Sal, home to The Lagoon Resort, captures 59.5 per cent of all hotel arrivals in the country. Tourism helped drive real GDP growth of 6.3 per cent in 2025, the World Bank reports.

Behind the headline numbers sits a structural change in who is travelling. Global research places women at between 54 and 84 per cent of all solo travellers, and searches for “solo travel for women” have climbed 30 per cent worldwide over the past five years. Luxury network Virtuoso reports that 71 per cent of its solo clients are female, while Google searches for “solo female travel” jumped 131 per cent in a single year.

Lisa Kellett, spokesperson for The Lagoon Resort, said: “The biggest travel trend in Cape Verde right now is the rise and rise of the single female traveller. Five years ago, our guest list was couples and families. Today we are welcoming women in their twenties and thirties arriving alone, staying longer and spending more, and they are not here to sit by a pool for a fortnight.”

Kellett continued: “They are hiking the ridges of Santo Antão, climbing Fogo’s volcano, learning to kitesurf off Santa Maria and staying out late in Mindelo listening to morna and funaná. The 18 to 35 market has discovered the real Cape Verde, the Creole culture, the food, the music, the people, and word is spreading faster than any advertising campaign we could buy.”

Safety is the second driver. The United States Department of State maintains Cape Verde at Level 1, Exercise Normal Precautions, its lowest and safest advisory rating.

The Global Peace Index places the archipelago in the top third of countries worldwide, and violent crime against visitors is rare. Numbeo scores Cape Verde’s crime index at 50.96 against 74.68 for South Africa, while independent safety assessments rate it 76 out of 100 for solo women, the highest in West Africa.

Said Kellett: “Women tell us the same thing again and again. They can walk back from a restaurant in Santa Maria at night and feel completely comfortable. Cape Verdean women are independent and respected, and that culture extends to visitors. There is little to no serious crime in the resort islands, and that reputation is now the single strongest reason women choose us over competing beach destinations.”

Cape Verde’s profile has risen further since the national football team qualified for the 2026 World Cup, an achievement that introduced the country of roughly 550,000 people to a global audience. Air connectivity has expanded in step, with passenger traffic up 60 per cent between 2022 and 2025 and 35 new routes added.

For more, go to https://lagoonresort.com/