Twenty-five people, the driver among them, were killed and 14 others hurt when a passenger bus carrying mostly secondary school students ran off the mountainous Campanas de Cima route and dropped about 100 feet into a rocky ravine on Fogo Island, Cape Verde, Africa, on Saturday, September 5, 2026.
The bus was heading back from a day trip to Chã das Caldeiras, the settlement inside the volcanic crater that dominates the island, when it went over the edge at about 9 p.m. local time. Teenagers accounted for most of the dead. São Filipe Mayor Nuias Silva confirmed the death toll on Saturday.
First accounts estimated about 30 people aboard, while a fuller count put the load at 38 passengers plus the driver. São Francisco de Assis Regional Hospital received around 19 people, four of them in serious condition, reporting from the island said. The island’s health authorities, cited by local media, said the condition of seven bodies required that they be buried immediately.
No transport accident on Cape Verdean soil has claimed more lives. The crash surpasses the 1999 crash of TACV Flight 5002.
Not a School-Organized Outing
Nearly everyone aboard was a student, yet the schools had not organized the outing, a local authority said. The driver arranged the trip himself each 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, lost most of those killed.
Rescuers Slowed by Rocky Terrain
The fall threw several people from the bus and trapped others inside. Rocky, difficult ground where the vehicle came to rest complicated the rescue and recovery effort.
In a posted statement, the São Filipe Municipal Council expressed solidarity with the families of the victims, along with the students’ classmates, their teachers and every educational community touched by the loss. A council team was in the field, the statement added, working alongside the Health Department, the National Police and the Municipal Volunteer Fire Department.
Cape Verde’s president, Jose Maria Neves, called the crash “a great catastrophe” 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 declared two days of national mourning.
Cause Remains Under Investigation
Authorities have opened an investigation and have not established an official cause. What happened in the moments before the bus went over the edge is described differently in the early accounts. A number of outlets in Cape Verde and abroad reported that the vehicle simply ran off the mountain road; others raised the prospect that a tire had failed, a hypothesis that investigators have yet to confirm as a finding.
Instead of settling on a single presumed cause, investigators must answer several questions. They need to determine what took the bus off the roadway, whether the vehicle was mechanically sound, and how much the route’s layout and any roadside barriers contributed to how severe the crash became. Rocks and terrain can batter a vehicle that leaves a road at a high point during its descent, and that punishment multiplies the force of the impact far beyond what an ordinary collision produces.
A Small Nation, an Outsized Loss
Cape Verde is an archipelago off the coast of Africa with a population of fewer than 600,000 people, so a loss of this scale reverberates through the whole country and not only the place where it happened. Among the inhabited islands, Fogo ranks as one of the smaller ones, and two neighboring communities supplied most of the dead.
Figures presented by Interior Minister Paulo Rocha counted 5,903 road crashes across the country in 2024, with 39 people killed, 154 seriously injured and 1,404 hurt less severely. That crash total was up 6.4 percent from 2023, and the death toll increased by two.
Those official tallies understate the problem, international estimates suggest. A 2023 road-safety profile put the number of people killed on Cape Verdean roads in 2021 at 97, well above the 39 fatalities officially reported for 2020, and gave a 2021 death rate of 16.5 per 100,000 residents.
Twenty-five people are dead and 14 injured from the crash at Campanas de Cima, and the investigation into what sent the bus off the road is still open.