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Praia sits on a series of volcanic plateaus called achada on the southern coast of Santiago Island, the largest of the Cape Verde archipelago. The location was deliberate: the original settlement sat lower at the coast and was too exposed to pirate raids, so the city moved uphill and has stayed there ever since. Charles Darwin stopped here on the HMS Beagle in January 1832, making Praia his first landfall after leaving England, and was struck by the contrast between the barren volcanic landscape and the clear light above it.

Cape Verde was uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived in 1462, which makes it one of the few places in the world with no indigenous population to displace.

The islands became an important station in the Atlantic slave trade, a function that shaped the mixed Creole population and the Kriolu language and the music called morna, made famous abroad by Cesaria Evora, who was born in Sao Vicente but gave the sound its international voice. Praia has the administrative weight of a capital without the self-consciousness: its market, its colonial-era grid in the old Platona district, and its informal seafront life all operate on their own terms.