Twenty-five people, the driver among them, were killed and 14 others hurt when a bus carrying mostly secondary school students went over the edge of the mountainous Campanas de Cima route on Fogo Island, Cape Verde, Africa, on Saturday, September 5, 2026, dropping about 100 feet into a rocky ravine.
A day trip had taken the passengers to Chã das Caldeiras, the settlement that sits inside the volcanic crater dominating the island, and the bus was heading home from there when it crashed at about 9 p.m. local time. Teenagers made up most of the dead. São Filipe Mayor Nuias Silva confirmed the death toll on Saturday.
First accounts put roughly 30 people on board; a fuller count instead listed 38 passengers plus the driver. Around 19 people went to São Francisco de Assis Regional Hospital, and island reporting described four of them as being in serious condition. Because of their condition, seven bodies were buried immediately, local media reported, citing the island’s health authorities.
No transport accident on Cape Verdean soil has killed more people. The previous worst was the 1999 crash of TACV Flight 5002.
Not a School-Organized Outing
Nearly everyone aboard was a student, yet their schools had not organized the outing, a local authority said. The driver himself arranged the trip every year for the students he drove during the school year, a local authority said, customarily at the end of one school year or before the start of the next.
Curral Grande and Ponta Verde, two communities on an island whose population is spread across steep terrain, accounted for most of the victims.
Rescuers Slowed by Rocky Terrain
The fall threw several people out of the bus and left others trapped inside. Crews then had to work on the rocky, difficult ground where the vehicle came to rest, which complicated the rescue and recovery effort.
The São Filipe Municipal Council, in a statement, stood with the bereaved families and extended that solidarity to the victims’ classmates, their teachers and every educational community touched by the loss. It also said a council team was in the field, working alongside the Health Department, the National Police and the Municipal Volunteer Fire Department.
“A great catastrophe” was how Cape Verde’s president, Jose Maria Neves, described the crash in a statement. “I offer my condolences to the bereaved families, to the friends of the victims, and to the island of Fogo,” he said. The government also declared two days of national mourning.
Cause Remains Under Investigation
Authorities have opened an investigation, and no official cause has been established. Accounts of the moments before the bus went over the edge diverged early on. Outlets in Cape Verde and abroad described the vehicle as having simply run off the mountain road; other reports raised a possible tire failure, which investigators treat as an early hypothesis rather than a finding.
Rather than settle on a single presumed cause, investigators must answer several questions. They need to determine why the bus left the roadway and whether it was mechanically sound, and to weigh what role the layout of the route and any roadside barriers played in the severity of the crash. Rocks and terrain can batter a vehicle that goes off a road at a high point as it falls, multiplying the force of the impact well beyond that of an ordinary collision.
A Small Nation, an Outsized Loss
Fewer than 600,000 people live in Cape Verde, an archipelago off the coast of Africa, so a crash of this scale registers nationally as well as locally. Among the smaller inhabited islands, Fogo counts as one, and two neighboring communities there supplied most of the dead.
Figures presented by Interior Minister Paulo Rocha counted 5,903 road crashes across the country in 2024, in which 39 people were killed, 154 were seriously injured and 1,404 were hurt less severely. Crashes rose 6.4 percent from 2023, and the death toll increased by two.
International estimates suggest the official tallies understate the problem. A 2023 road-safety profile counted 97 people killed on Cape Verdean roads in 2021, a total well above the 39 fatalities officially reported for 2020, and it put the 2021 death rate at 16.5 per 100,000 residents.
For now, the Campanas de Cima toll stands at 25 dead and 14 injured, and the investigation into what sent the bus off the road is still open.