Pico Cão Grande

PeaksÓbo Ulusal Parkı,São Tomé and Príncipe

A rock needle standing 370 metres out of rainforest on São Tomé — the hardened plug of a volcano whose softer flanks eroded off the island.

September·Peaking now

Jun–Sep

From July, humpbacks and their calves work the south coast — the boats that line up the needle watch for blows on the way.

Year-round The needle stands year-round. The cloud that hides and reveals it comes and goes through the day rather than with the season; the season only changes how often you catch the peak clear.

Pico Cão Grande is a bare rock needle standing 370 metres straight out of the rainforest, with nothing around it the same shape. The tower rises from the forest floor in the south of São Tomé, inside Parque Natural Obô, and its summit reaches 663 metres above the sea. From the EN-2 road near Dona Augusta the forest falls away and the spire simply stands up in the windscreen; from a boat offshore it reads as a dark thorn on the island's skyline. What you are looking at is the inside of a volcano. Magma congealed in the vent of a cone on the Cameroon volcanic line about 3.5 million years ago, and the soft flanks then eroded off the island, leaving the hard phonolite plug alone. You may not see it at all. Warm air off the south coast is forced up the tower and condenses, so a cap of cloud builds and dissolves over the peak through the day. The needle shows, then vanishes, then hangs in grey with no ground beneath it. A guided walk through mud, roots and river crossings reaches its foot, where dense forest, loud with endemic birds, ends against a bare vertical wall. Climbers have been coming since a Portuguese team tried the wall in 1975 and failed. The first ascent went to three Japanese climbers, Yosuke Takahashi, Kenichi Moriyama and Naotoshi Agata, in February 1991. In 2018 the Basque brothers Iker and Eneko Pou freed a new line and named it Leve Leve, after the local phrase for taking life slowly. The land below the peak is no longer wild. An industrial oil-palm company has farmed the flats since 2009, though a court ruling in favour of local residents now bars it from clearing more forest around the Obô park.

Worth knowing

Good to know

The walk to the base needs a guide — three to six hours return through mud, river crossings and private plantation land, with no marked trail to follow.
Leave the wall to expedition teams — snakes live on the rock, and the free routes up it start at 8b, at the edge of what big-wall climbers can do.
This is a malaria zone — São Tomé and Príncipe carries year-round transmission, so start prophylaxis before you travel and cover up at dusk, which is exactly when the forest walk ends.

Things to do

1
Trek to where the forest stops dead
A guided walk through the Obô rainforest — mud, roots, stream crossings, palms closing overhead — brings you out at the tower's foot. The last few metres are the point: the green simply ends, and a bare vertical wall goes up out of sight.
2
Climb a wall that grows plants in its holds
The angle is not what makes this wall hard: its rock, a fine-grained volcanic stone called phonolite, is coated in moss and a slippery film of algae. Small plants grow inside the very cracks a climber grips, and the weather can turn while you are hanging on the face. Only expedition-grade teams get up; everyone else stands at the bottom and looks up.
3
Line up both dog peaks from the sea
From a boat off the south coast, Cão Grande and its slimmer sibling Cão Pequeno stack up behind the forested slopes. It is the one view that holds both towers at once, with the green wall of Obô rising behind them.
4
Pull off the EN-2 at Dona Augusta
Where the southern road towards Porto Alegre breaks out of the forest, stop at the Dona Augusta pull-off and frame the spire standing over the oil palms. Come in the first hours after sunrise: the cloud cap thickens as the day warms, and the tower is usually gone by late morning.