The assessment of soil properties through geotechnical tests is a crucial activity to understand its behaviour. In this context, field tests emerge as a robust approach to characterize the geotechnical behaviour of materials according to their in situ condition. However, the interpretation of these tests often relies on empirical correlations, which can become complex when dealing with soils with notable heterogeneity. This paper objective is to determine the strength parameters for a heterogeneous tropical soil deposit using data from CPTu with pore pressure dissipation tests and laboratory direct shear test (DSS). A layer identified as low-strength soil classified as silty-sand to silty-clay exhibited partial drainage during a standard-rate cone penetration. The approach proposed by Randolph and DeJong (2012)[1] was used to determine the penetration rate necessary to mobilize an undrained behaviour of the material, since the cone penetration results shown that the material is mostly clay-like. CPTu tests were also conducted with penetration rates of 6 cm/s and 10 cm/s, to proper estimate the undrained shear strength (Su). These tests, along with the porepressure dissipation experiments, reinforced the presence of an upperlayer with preconsolidated behaviour layer, following the works of Chai et al. (2012)[2], enabling the estimation for the overconsolidation ratio (OCR). For the normally consolidated portion of the residual soil, rapid tests that achieved a normalized velocity (V) associated with distinctly undrained penetration were used to derive the undrained shear strength (Su), with a cone factor (Nkt) estimated from standard-rate tests available. The geotechnical parameters estimated were then compared with the laboratory data results.