A bus crash on Cape Verde's Fogo Island killed about 25 people on Saturday, with most of the dead students and young people from the Curral Grande and Ponta Verde areas. José Pedro Gonçalves, the Education Ministry delegate in São Filipe, said the trip was not organized by the schools.
Initial reports said the bus veered off the road, fell down a roughly 30-meter cliff, and landed in a rocky ravine that was difficult to access. Twenty of the fatalities died at the scene, and five more died in hospital overnight.
São Filipe and the trip
Gonçalves said the trip was one the driver regularly organized each year with students he transported during the school year. The driver was among those who died in the crash, which leaves the school-year routine tied to a day of loss for families in Curral Grande and Ponta Verde.
The crash also complicated rescue work because the ravine was hard to reach. That made the first hours after the fall especially consequential for anyone still trapped near the wreckage.
Fogo Island recovery
Seven victims were buried overnight after the crash, a sign of how quickly the community moved from the scene to mourning. The death toll includes people described as students and young people, rather than a single age group or one school, which points to a wider loss across the two areas named in the reports.
Officials said the cause of the crash is still unknown, leaving the road departure and the fall into the ravine as the only parts of the sequence that have been described so far. For families waiting on answers, the immediate fact is the same one that has already changed everything on Fogo Island: a routine trip ended with 25 dead, many of them young.
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