Traffic in Cape Verde ports to grow to 114,000 passengers from 2023

Ports of Cape Verde handled 114,075 passengers in inter-island shipping in January, up 21.1% from the same month in 2022, according to official figures provided by Lusa this Thursday.

According to the monthly traffic report of Enapor, the state-owned company responsible for managing the archipelago’s nine ports, January registrations still represent a 14.6% drop from December, despite passenger traffic remaining above 100,000 passengers per month.

Last August, Cape Verde’s ports recorded a historic record of 181,420 passengers, thus maintaining a recovery from a sharp decline since 2020, when passenger traffic between the islands was driven by measures to contain the covid-19 pandemic.

The previous all-time high for inter-island shipping was also recorded in August 2021, when global passenger traffic was 168,901.

In January last year, passenger traffic in Porto Grande was 36.6% of the total, and in Porto Novo – 32.5%, respectively, on the neighboring islands of Sao Vicente and Santo Antao. The port of Praia, the country’s capital, recorded a share of 11.2% of the total, with passenger traffic falling to 12,788 passengers, according to a report by Enapor, to which Lusa had access.

CV Interilhas, led (51%) by the Portuguese company Transinsular of the ETE group, has a 20-year public maritime transport concession for passengers and cargo since August 2019, concentrating these operations.

According to data released in August by Lusa, CV Interilhas alone carried about 1.5 million passengers during its three years of operation in the archipelago.

Overall, the ports of Cape Verde handled 635 ship calls in December, up 9.5% from the same month in 2022, while year-on-year cargo turnover increased by 22.2% to 198,687 tons.

Lusa previously reported that Cape Verdean ports handled a record 1,357,247 passengers in 2022, up 24.6% from 1,088,626 passengers in 2021.