A passenger bus carrying schoolchildren went over the edge late in the afternoon of Saturday, September 5, 2026, plunging about 30 meters (100 feet) into a rocky ravine on the mountain road between Chã das Caldeiras and Campanas de Cima on Fogo Island, Cape Verde. Twenty-five people died, the driver among them, and 13 were injured.
They were heading home at about 6 p.m. from a day trip to Chã das Caldeiras, the village inside the crater of Pico do Fogo that was largely destroyed when the volcano erupted in 2014. The bus left the road on the descent and rolled down a stone slope.
Thirty-eight people were aboard, including the driver, the government said after a week of shifting counts. Twenty died at the scene and five more in hospital. Authorities settled on 13 injured after correcting the passenger total, having established that a pregnant woman first counted among the casualties had been travelling in a separate vehicle on the same road.
Eighteen young passengers taken to the Hospital Regional São Francisco de Assis in São Filipe were aged between six and 16, and a five-year-old was treated and released. Three were later moved to Praia. Most of those aboard were children and teenagers.
Janira Hopffer Almada, president of the National Assembly, called it the deadliest road accident recorded in Cape Verde. Prime Minister Francisco Carvalho, born on Fogo himself, called it the greatest tragedy since independence.
Not a School-Organized Outing
Students filled nearly every seat, but the excursion had not come from their schools. The driver arranged it himself, education officials said, as he did every year for the pupils he carried on his school-year route. He was among the dead: Henrique Cardoso, known across the island as Djedjino, who had driven students for decades.
Seventeen of the 25 dead were students, according to José Pedro Gonçalves, the education ministry’s delegate in São Filipe — 14 from the Curral Grande school grouping and three from Ponta Verde.
Burials Before Dawn
The fall threw several people from the bus and trapped others inside, and crews had to work on rocky ground where it came to rest. Seven of the dead were buried at about 3:30 a.m. on Sunday at São Lourenço — on the health delegation’s orders, because of the condition of the bodies, Inforpress and Expresso das Ilhas reported, though A Nação put the timing down to logistics and the families’ requests. The remaining 18 were buried that afternoon after a funeral mass.
President José Maria Neves wrote on the day of the crash, when the known toll stood at 10, that it was “a true tragedy” and offered “my condolences to the bereaved families, to the friends of the victims, and to the island of Fogo.” He flew to Fogo the next day and attended the funerals with the prime minister. The government declared two days of national mourning; São Filipe declared two days of municipal mourning of its own.
Cause Remains Under Investigation
No official cause has been established. A government resolution published in the official gazette on September 11 created a commission of inquiry into the causes, the circumstances and any responsibilities. It began work on September 14 under Emanuel Almeida, the director-general of road transport, drawing in the police, civil protection, the roads agency and the insurer Garantia Seguros, and will examine the bus’s maintenance, the road’s alignment and signage, the driver’s qualifications and the emergency response. No reporting deadline has been set.
Early accounts differed on what happened in the moments before the bus went over. Some outlets described it simply running off the road; witnesses relayed through Cape Verdean television raised a tire blowout, a theory no authority has endorsed. Health Minister Lúcio Miranda said on September 10 that officials held partial information they would not release: “What we have to do is an exhaustive investigation, calmly, so that we do not run the risk of releasing false or incorrect information.” No finding has followed.
The road is new. Then-Prime Minister Ulisses Correia e Silva inaugurated the 24-kilometer northern route to Chã das Caldeiras in July 2024, and a year earlier the deputy Luís Pires had reported significant damage to the unfinished work and called it poorly done. The complaints since the crash — steep descents, tight curves, no guard barriers, no signage — surfaced afterward, not before.
A Small Nation, an Outsized Loss
Fewer than half a million people live in Cape Verde, an archipelago off the West African coast — the 2021 census counted 491,233 — so a crash of this scale registers nationally. The government has covered the funerals and relatives’ travel from Praia. Mayor Nuías Silva announced 100,000 escudos, about $1,040, for each victim rather than each family, plus psychological support and a donation account. On September 15 the council added six months of food parcels for 29 families, school kits, free school transport and a waiver of cemetery fees.
Figures presented to parliament in March 2025 by Paulo Rocha, then the interior minister, counted 5,903 road crashes in 2024, which killed 39 people, seriously injured 154 and left 1,404 hurt less severely. Crashes rose 6.4 percent from 2023, while the death toll increased by two.
Those counts capture only reported crashes. The World Health Organization’s 2023 road-safety report, which corrects for under-reporting, estimated 97 road deaths in Cape Verde in 2021 against the 39 the country reported for 2020, and put the death rate at 16.5 per 100,000.
The wreck was still in the ravine as of September 9, when a technical team was weighing whether it would have to be dismantled in place because the available cranes could not reach it. Five children remain in Praia — four with fractures and one in intensive care with severe head trauma. The roads agency hoped for first results from its own assessment before September 20, and nothing has been announced since. The mourning has spread: every Cape Verdean mission abroad held a minute’s silence on September 16, and the Santa Catarina and São Miguel councils called off their festivals and municipal-day programs.