Humpback Whale: The Beautiful Giant in Cape Verde

Dawn just came over Santa Maria harbour. The Atlantic stretches endlessly before us, deceptively calm. The yacht slowly cuts through the waves as we head north-west from Sal Island. We’re chasing the rumours of the peaceful giants. At some point, the captain looks at us with a gentle smile, “Be patient,” he says with a strong Portuguese accent. “They come when they come.”

We’re hunting for humpback whales — though hunting seems the wrong word for this reverent pursuit. These waters off Cape Verde host one of the ocean’s most fragile populations: fewer than 300 individuals that represent the Northeast Atlantic’s only known breeding ground for the species. Every sighting matters. Every whale counts.

Twenty minutes out, someone shouts. A distant plume of spray catches the morning light. Then another. The boat erupts in whispers and fumbling for cameras, but I keep my eyes on the water. Nothing quite prepares you for that first glimpse of a 40-ton animal moving with the grace of a dancer.

The Great Migration’s Southern Terminal

Picture this: A whale that spent summer gorging on krill in Norway’s Barents Sea now glides through tropical waters 5,000 miles south. She hasn’t eaten in weeks. Won’t eat for weeks more. Her body, thick with blubber from months of feeding, sustains both her and the calf growing inside her.

This is the paradox of humpback migration — a journey from feast to famine, from the world’s most productive waters to some of its clearest and most nutrient-poor. Yet these crystalline seas around Cape Verde offer something the cold North Atlantic cannot: a sanctuary for birth and courtship.

The first humpbacks arrive in December, trickling in like early guests to a party. By February, the gathering builds. March and April bring the crescendo — males singing their haunting songs, females with newborn calves sheltering in the lee of islands, adolescents learning the ancient choreography of their species.

A remarkable discovery in 2024 shattered previous assumptions about these whales’ travels. Scientists identified a whale photographed in Cape Verde in 1999 surfacing in West Greenland waters 22 years later—the first documented crossing between these regions. This finding rewrote the map of humpback migration and raised urgent questions about the population’s vulnerability to Greenlandic hunting quotas.

Facts About Humpback Whales (Megaptera novaeangliae)

• Humpback whales are among the most recognisable and widely studied of the great whales, known for their acrobatic breaches, haunting songs, and long pectoral fins that can reach up to a third of their body length.
• Adults typically grow between 12 and 16 metres and weigh around 30–40 tonnes.
• They are migratory animals, travelling thousands of kilometres each year between feeding grounds in cold, nutrient-rich polar waters and breeding grounds in tropical and subtropical seas.
• Humpback whales primarily feed on krill and small schooling fish, employing techniques such as bubble-net feeding, where groups of whales create spirals of bubbles to trap their prey.
• Their complex vocalisations, produced mainly by males during breeding season, are thought to play a role in mating behaviour and social communication, and can travel vast distances underwater.
• Once heavily hunted, humpback populations have made significant recoveries since the 1986 international moratorium on commercial whaling. However, they still face threats from ship strikes, entanglement in fishing gear, and climate-driven changes to their habitats.

Humpback Whale Songs Beneath the Surface

Drop a hydrophone into these waters during peak season, and you enter an alien concert hall. Male humpbacks sing — really sing — in structured patterns that evolve like jazz improvisations. Each song lasts up to 30 minutes before repeating. The low-frequency pulses travel 30 kilometres through water, turning the ocean into a vast amphitheatre.

Scientists still debate the songs’ precise purpose. Mate attraction? Territorial declaration? Something more complex? What we know is that Cape Verde’s humpback whales sing their own dialect, distinct from those of their cousins in the Caribbean or Hawaii. Cultural transmission, learned and passed down, just as human languages spread through generations.

Above water, the show continues. A whale breaches — 30 tons of flesh and bone defying gravity, suspended momentarily against the sky before crashing back in an explosion of white water. Passengers gasp. Cameras click futilely, unable to capture the raw power of the moment.

Then comes the tail slap — a massive fluke striking water with the force of a falling tree. Some researchers believe it’s communication. Others see aggression or play. Perhaps it’s all three. These animals don’t reveal their secrets easily.

Mothers and Calves in Paradise

In the sheltered waters between Sal and Boavista, a mother humpback teaches her calf the basics of being a whale. The lesson plan is demanding: surface breathing, diving techniques, the 5,000-mile route to northern feeding grounds that the calf must memorise on its first journey.

Cape Verdean waters provide an ideal classroom. Warm temperatures mean newborns don’t need thick blubber immediately. Relatively calm seas between islands offer protection from Atlantic swells. The volcanic underwater topography creates a variety of depths for diving practice.

Watch long enough and you’ll see the calf’s clumsy attempts at breaching—more belly flop than graceful leap. The mother remains patient, sometimes lifting the youngster on her massive pectoral fins, the longest appendages in the animal kingdom relative to body size.

These maternal scenes hide a harsh reality. The mother hasn’t eaten since leaving northern waters. She won’t eat until she returns. Milk production alone costs her a ton of body weight. By the time she reaches Norway or Iceland again, she’ll be a shadow of her former self, desperate to replenish reserves before the cycle begins anew.

An Industry Built on Wonder

Santa Maria transformed from a salt-shipping port to a tourist hub partly because of these whales. During peak season, multiple boats depart daily from the harbour, each carrying hopeful whale watchers armed with cameras and expectations.

The economics are straightforward: A half-day tour costs €40-65 per person. A boat might carry 20 passengers. Two trips daily. Multiply that by dozens of operators across Sal and Boavista, and you’re looking at millions of euros annually flowing into local communities — money that makes living whales infinitely more valuable than dead ones.

Roberto, a former fisherman turned whale guide, tells me how his perspective shifted. “My grandfather hunted whales. My father fished where whales fed. I take people to admire them. My daughter studies marine biology. Four generations, four relationships with the same animal.”

Not all operators are equal. The best employ marine biologists, maintain respectful distances, and turn each trip into an education. Others chase quick profits, harassing whales for that perfect tourist photo. The Cape Verdean government struggles to enforce effective regulations across a vast ocean surrounding its islands, given its limited resources.

Racing Against Time

Here’s what keeps researchers awake: The Cape Verde population teeters on the edge of genetic viability. Three hundred individuals isn’t just a small number — it’s a bottleneck that poses a significant threat to long-term survival. Every whale that doesn’t return from migration represents a measurable loss to genetic diversity.
Commercial whaling drove this population to the brink of extinction. Between 1866 and 1966, an estimated 200,000 humpback whales were killed globally by hunters. Cape Verde’s population bore its share of slaughter. What swims here now are descendants of the few that escaped the harpoons.

Modern threats are subtler but no less deadly. Ship strikes and stress factors increase as maritime traffic grows. Ocean acidification, driven by the absorption of carbon, affects the entire food chain. Microplastics accumulate in whale tissues. Climate change shifts ocean currents, which disrupts the conditions that have made Cape Verdean waters suitable for humpback breeding across millennia.

The recent discovery in West Greenland adds another concern. Greenland maintains a legal subsistence hunt for humpback whales, with an annual quota of ten whales. If Cape Verde whales regularly travel there, even a single whale taken could represent a significant loss to the breeding population.

Witnesses to Resilience

Back on the boat, we’ve been watching the same mother and calf for twenty minutes. Tourism rules say we should move on, but the whales seem curious about us. The calf approaches, spy-hopping — lifting its head vertically from the water to observe these strange floating creatures.

In that moment, the distance between species collapses. You’re looking into an eye the size of a grapefruit, an eye connected to a brain complex enough for culture, emotion, perhaps even something like wonder. The calf sees you seeing it. Recognition passes between mammal and mammal.

An elderly Portuguese woman beside me weeps quietly. “Meu Deus,” she whispers — my God.
This is what conservation comes down to — not statistics or regulations, but moments of connection that transform observers into advocates. Every person who sees a whale becomes part of its story, part of its argument for existence.

Humpback Whale: The Uncertain Future

As our boat turns back toward Santa Maria, dorsal fins of pilot whales slice the water nearby — year-round residents that remind us these waters teem with cetacean life beyond the seasonal humpback visitors. Twenty-four species of whales and dolphins call Cape Verdean waters home, from massive sperm whales to playful bottlenose dolphins.

The humpbacks will leave soon. By late May, most will have begun their northern journey, following currents and instincts encoded across generations. The calves born here will return in three to five years, sexually mature and ready to continue the cycle if the oceans let them. If humans let them.

Conservation success is measured in generations, not years. The global humpback population has rebounded from approximately 10,000 individuals to nearly 80,000 — proof that protection is adequate. However, Cape Verde’s population remains stagnant, neither growing nor shrinking significantly, teetering on a knife-edge between recovery and extinction.

Planning Your Encounter With A Humpback Whale

Humpback Whale: The Life Continues

Standing on Santa Maria’s pier at sunset, I watch the ocean where we’d spent the morning. Somewhere out there, hidden beneath darkening waters, giants move through their ancient routines. Males sing songs we barely understand. Mothers nurse calves in nature’s most precarious classroom. An entire population — small, vulnerable, irreplaceable — continues its million-year dance with extinction.

The humpback whales of Sal Island aren’t just another wildlife spectacle. They’re a test of whether humans can coexist with creatures that require vast spaces and deep time. Their presence here, against all odds, speaks to resilience. Their fragility reminds us that resilience has limits.

Tomorrow, another boat will leave this harbour. More people will scan the horizon for spouts and splashes. Some will see whales. Others won’t. But all will become part of this story — the ongoing narrative of whether we’ll have the wisdom to protect what we’ve nearly destroyed.

The whales don’t care about our documentary, our research papers, or tourist dollars. They come to these waters because their ancestors did, following patterns older than any human civilisation. In their indifference to our attention lies their majesty. In our attention to them lies their hope.

As darkness falls over the Atlantic, somewhere between here and the horizon, a whale song rises through the water column — ancient, mournful, magnificent. It needs no translation. It says everything.

Bibliography

• First documented movement of a humpback whale between the Cape Verde Islands and West Greenland, group work, Ecology and Evolution 2024 Mar 15;14(3):e11152, PubMed Central, National Library of Medicine;
• Humpback Whale – Species Directory at NOAA Fisheries;
• The Best Places to Go Whale Watching in Cape Verde at CaboWork.com; 
• Whale watching in Cape Verde at Discover-Cape-Verde.com; 
• Whales on capeverdeislands.org;