Trekking in São Tomé and Príncipe | Rainforest and Cocoa Trails, 9 Days

Some islands you see from the road. This one you see on foot.

São Tomé is a volcanic island covered in forest, with trails that climb from sea level to 1,400 metres in a few kilometres, paths cut more than a century ago to serve the cocoa and coffee plantations, and a southern coast with almost no roads at all. It is rare walking country: humid, dense, endemic — and almost empty.

This is a 9-day walking circuit at level 2/3, with daily stages of 2h30 to 5h. You climb from the Bom Sucesso botanical garden to the crater of Lagoa Amélia, cross primary forest inside Obô Natural Park, follow the old plantation paths of the north down to the sea at Neves, walk among cocoa trees in the shade of giant fromagers, drop into the wild south along deserted beaches to the mouth of the Malanza river, and finish on foot on Ilhéu das Rolas, on the Equator — one foot in each hemisphere.

What you see along the way is not in the guidebooks: marmulanos and wild orchids found nowhere else, giant begonias, Pico Cão Grande rising 663 metres above the forest, waterfalls to swim in at the end of a stage, and the roças — Monte Café, Santa Luzia, Água Izé — whole towns given back to the forest.

Three deliberately different places to sleep: a boutique hotel in the city, a restored cocoa plantation in the middle of the forest, and an ecolodge on the beach in the south. Island food, cooked fresh, in the homes of the people who live there.

The group is capped at 12 and is accompanied by an agency guide and by local guides who know the trails and the island's botany. Flights leave from Lisbon, direct and with no time difference: six and a half hours later you are at the start of the first trail. Travellers from elsewhere connect through Lisbon and we can arrange it.