I had imagined the Azores as something like Hawaii — tropical, volcanic, Portuguese. I was wrong about the first part.
We had come from Lisbon, which has its own unhurried quality — the trams that take the hills at their own pace, the long lunches, the evenings that begin late and end later. Lisbon had already encouraged our deceleration. Then our plane touched down in Horta, and the pace slowed further still, to something closer to a full stop.
Salty air whipped through our hair. The surf battered the sea wall. Dark clouds pushed their way toward the bay. We had just settled into the apartment — a few days’ home above the water — when a downpour hammered against the windows. Then the torrent waned as quickly as it had come.
Timing is everything. We made a break for the seafood restaurant down the street, Restaurante Atlético, open only a few hours for dinner. Without a reservation we were seated in the outer room, thick with humidity, watching other foreigners filter in as the rain subsided. I went into the main room to see what the Atlantic had offered up that day — the catch displayed in an open case, still and fresh. Our table soon filled with platters of octopus, limpets, mussels, wreck-fish, and barracuda. The geography was present in every dish.
Later that night, we walked down to the old fort and marina in the darkness, a warm glow lighting the waterfront path. Back at the restaurant, we had fallen into conversation with a couple of Swedish oceanographers who had sailed into Horta — researchers who spoke of their studies and of the particularly good morning swims in the bay. The Azores sit at a confluence of currents; the water here is not incidental to the science.
The next morning we found coffee by the water’s edge near Porto Pim, the fortification wall beside us, the sea beyond. Then we walked the length of the town, following the promenade along the marina, past the fort we had seen the night before only as a dark silhouette — now visible in the morning light as what it was: a reminder of a time when these remote Atlantic islands were worth defending against pirates and invaders, when Horta’s harbor was a strategic waypoint rather than a sailor’s sanctuary.
Faial is one of nine islands in the Azores, a volcanic archipelago sitting nearly a thousand miles west of the European continent, uninhabited before its Portuguese discovery during the Age of Exploration.
Like all Azorean towns, Horta is defined by the contrast of black volcanic basalt against whitewashed plaster walls, the walkways and roads combining both stones into intricate geometric patterns — nowhere more striking than along the marina, where over the decades, sailors arriving from Atlantic crossings have left painted flags on the low concrete wall surrounding the harbor, a mosaic of journeys made across open water. The marina is a waypoint for those crossing between continents; the painted flags are their signatures.
That day we drove the island, stopping first at a miradouro above Horta to take in the town and harbor from above before continuing up the hill to the botanical garden.
Faial’s botanical garden works quietly to preserve what existed before the islands became famous for their flowers — protecting indigenous species threatened by the invasive plants that now define the landscape: hydrangeas, ginger lilies, belladonna, agapanthus, all gorgeous, all crowding out what was here first. Inside the garden, only the natives remain.
Heading northwest, the landscape changed register entirely. The vibrant greens gave way to fields of ash and raw volcanic rock. At Ponta dos Capelinhos, the lighthouse rose from a half-buried base, its lower section swallowed by the eruptions of the late 1950s that added a new peninsula to the island’s western tip.
We climbed the ash slope to the lookout point above — me in sandals, which proved manageable and inadvisable in roughly equal measure. The open desolation of the ash fields, the buried lighthouse, the new land still asserting itself at the island’s western edge: Capelinhos is what the Azores looked like before five hundred years of habitation softened the rest of it.
From the sunny warmth of the coast we drove back inland and upward toward Miradouro da Caldeira, Faial’s primary crater — though the weather cam at the summit had already told us what to expect: zero visibility. I changed into white leather sneakers and a waterproof windbreaker for what was ahead.
The road wound upward through dense foliage, past cows grazing in fog-shrouded pastures, their bells echoing faintly in the still air. Faial’s dairy culture runs deep — the island produces some of the Azores’ finest cheeses, among them Queijo do Morro Amanteigado, a soft, buttery cow’s milk cheese that had appeared at our table earlier for lunch.
At the summit the road ended at a lookout where clouds had swallowed the world entirely. Wet wind lashed our faces. At the center of it all stood a small altar — solitary, resolute — offering its quiet reward to anyone willing to climb into the weather to find it.
Descending out of the clouds, we stopped at Miradouro do Monte Carneiro, where a small pack of sheep grazed on the open slope, apparently unconcerned with the view.
The caldera behind us was still entirely shrouded, but the sky ahead had cleared enough that through the marine layer, just visible on the horizon, was Pico Island — its volcano hidden in cloud but its mass unmistakable. Somewhere on that island, Jeff’s great-grandfather had been born, had worked, and had eventually set sail for California. Tomorrow we would take the ferry across.
That evening, back at the apartment, we watched a kiteboarder working the bay at sunset — the kind of effortless, unhurried thing that seems to happen naturally in places where the wind and water are always present. Jeff had grown quieter over the course of the day. The water his ancestor had crossed was below the window, and it had apparently been calling to him since the oceanographers first mentioned their morning swims.
The next day we took the ferry across to Pico, where Jeff stood for the first time on the soil of his great-grandfather’s island, returning to Horta that evening. Our last morning in the Azores — before our driver came to take us to the airport for São Miguel — Jeff had already been down to the beach in the bay below our apartment for a swim in the Atlantic. He arrived back just in time. He hadn’t mentioned he was going. Some things don’t require announcement.
Faial connects to the Azores Atlas and the Portugal country page. The journey continued on Pico Island →