INVENTORY OF SITES OF GEOTOURISTIC INTERESTS ON BOA VISTA ISLAND (CAPE VERDE)

Boa Vista is the second largest island (620 km²) of Cape Verde, with a flat topography interrupted by ancient volcanic outcrops (Marrero et al., 2024) and an arid climate with barely 150 mm/year of rainfall and an average temperature of 25ºC (Varo-Cruz, 2010). The island is of eruptive genesis and its main geomorphological features are volcanic outcrops, stony plains, alluvial fans and large expanses of sand that the trade winds move from the NE to the SW of the island, giving rise to wide beaches of mobile and fossil dunes totalling 67 km in length, corresponding to ∼71 % of the total perimeter of the island (Sousa-Guedes et al., 2025). Boa Vista has a population of about 13,000 inhabitants and is the second tourist destination in the country with more than 260,000 tourists/year (INE, 2025). It is a sun and beach tourist destination restricted to city resorts located along the west coast and one in the south in Praia de Lacacão (Sousa-Guedes et al., 2025). The aim of this work is to carry out an inventory of sites of geotouristic interest (SGIs) following the methodology applied on other volcanic islands (Hernández-Ramos et al., 2024). A total of 14 SGIs have been inventoried, representative of the island's natural and cultural heritage, well preserved and accessible. The SGIs are grouped into volcanic and non-volcanic. The cultural heritage of the SGIs is associated with traditional constructions, cobbled streets, walls of cultivated plots, lime kilns, etc. With this inventory, the managers of the territory will have a document that can help them to value the geoheritage of the island, diversify the growing tourism that is highly concentrated on the coast and on some beaches of Boa Vista, and minimise and avoid the negative effects of tourism on the deterioration of geoforms, on plastic pollution (Sousa-Guedes et al., 2025), or on turtle habitats.