Santa Isabel is a ghost village in the eastern interior of Boa Vista — a cluster of stone buildings that were abandoned in the twentieth century as the island's interior became too arid and economically marginal to sustain small farming communities. The structures are roofless but intact enough to read as a village: lanes between houses, a small church, the outlines of yards and fields.
The silence and remoteness are the point. On the approach through the scrubby, windswept landscape, Santa Isabel feels genuinely far from anywhere. The village is reachable by 4WD from Sal Rei, usually as part of a circuit that takes in the dunes and eastern beaches.