This week’s dream: islands on the edge of the world
With their “epic” landscapes and “sapphire” seas, the Azores are wondrous, and wonderfully unspoilt, says Trish Lorenz in Condé Nast Traveller. Spread across almost 400 miles of the Atlantic, the archipelago lies directly to the west of Portugal – roughly 900 miles from Lisbon – and was uninhabited until the 15th century, when the Portuguese arrived and started to settle the nine principal islands. All are volcanic, but they have so little else in common they could be in different solar systems – from Pico, with its lavacovered moonscape, to verdant Flores, where waterfalls plunge hundreds of feet over emerald green cliffs.
The main island, São Miguel, offers sophisticated urban pleasures in its colonial capital, Ponta Delgada, including Õtaka, a restaurant where chef José Pereira “combines Azorean ingredients with Japanese techniques”. Beyond it lie “hydrangea-filled” hills, crater lakes and medicinal thermal pools. Floating on your back in one, watching the sky turn from blue to red at sunset, you feel “as weightless and still as a baby in the womb”. On Pico, a 50-minute flight away, there are 550-year-old family-owned vineyards to visit, and the highest peak in Portugal to climb – Mount Pico (2,351 metres), the steep slopes of which are an “extraterrestrial environment” of wrinkled, cooled lava and “clumps of purple heather and ferns”. Near the summit, steam whistles from cracks in the ground, and the rocks are hot to the touch.
Neighbouring São Jorge has a worldclass surf spot, Fajã de Santo Cristo, that is accessible only by hiking down misty, forested cliffs, along ancient paths fragrant with wild mint. And then there is Flores, the wildest and most “elemental” island of all, where “green meets blue” wherever you look, and waves attack “jagged” columns of black basalt around the coast. Azores Getaways (azoresgetaways. com) offers trips staying in good local hotels.