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Praia month by month — at a glance
Hover each month for the summary. Click to pin it.
01 Twelve and a half days
Key moments at a glance
0.0 mm in the 1991–2020 series, with 285 hours of sun and 28.1 °C.
306.9 hours of sun: nearly ten hours a day on average.
The wettest and most humid month: 76.8%. And the record: 36.2 °C.
4.4 mm, 29.8 °C and the vegetation the rains left still standing.
The cause is position. The archipelago sits in the same band of the Atlantic as the Sahara, level with the Sahel, and receives the dry air coming off the continent. The only thing that breaks that regime is the seasonal shift of the tropical rains northwards, which reaches these islands briefly and irregularly between August and October.
March brings 0.1 millimetres. April and June bring 0.0. Three months of the year in which the word "rain" is, statistically, a rounding error.
02 The brown island and the green one
Here is the real decision, and it has nothing to do with getting wet. Santiago changes colour twice a year. From December to July the slopes are bare: brown earth, dry terraces, and green only on the ravine floors, where some water remains. From September to November, after the rains, the same island covers itself in grass and scrub.
Neither version is the right one. The brown island has its geology on display: you can see the lava layers, the plateau edges, the old terraces. The green island is gentler and more photogenic, but it covers exactly that. It is worth knowing which one you are choosing.
03 The thermometer barely takes part
The second feature of this climate is that the sea flattens everything. The mean high runs from 26.7 degrees in January to 31 in October; the mean low from 19.5 in February to 24.4 in September. Four degrees of range above and five below, across twelve months.
The historic extremes say the same: the heat record is 36.2 degrees and the cold record 16.2. Twenty degrees between the two furthest-apart values ever recorded. It is never cold here and never dangerously hot.
What does move, and considerably, is humidity: from 62.6% in March to 76.8% in September. At 30 degrees, those fourteen points are the difference between dry, pleasant warmth and sticky closeness. If your tolerance for humidity is low, that is your figure, not the temperature.
04 November, the answer
If you can only come once, come in November. It is the month that combines the two good things: 4.4 millimetres of rain over two-tenths of a day, and the green the rains left still standing. Humidity has already dropped to 69.8% and the mean high is 29.8 degrees. No other month offers that combination.
After November, March, April and May, the months of guaranteed sun — 285 and 306.9 hours in April and May — and of the year's lowest humidity. The island will be brown, but the air will be clean and the plateaus will look like what they are: cut layers of lava.
And avoid August and September, which between them hold 129.9 of the year's 176.9 millimetres, humidity climbs to 76% and sunshine falls to 201.5 hours: the cloudiest month of the calendar in a place where the sun is the argument. With twelve rain days spread across the year, running into four or five of them in the same week is avoidable bad luck.
