A world of difference

Ash in the blood

My opinion of Faial was certainly more favourable than that of the 19th-century author Mark Twain. He landed there in 1867 aboard the steamship Quaker City on the first leg of a European journey that would later become part of his travel classic The Innocents Abroad. The author declared the locals to be little better ‘than the donkeys they eat and sleep with’, sparing only its towns (‘miracles of cleanliness’) his wrath before sulking off to Gibraltar.

Twain’s ship had initially been bound for São Miguel until a storm forced him to dock at its smaller cousin. I had better luck, and my first impressions upon touching down on São Miguel, the largest and most populous island in the archipelago, were of just how similar it was to my birthplace in Northern Portugal, where I had also grown up. I was greeted by green pastures speckled with Friesian cows, white houses roofed with orange tiles, and mist drifting over green hills. Nostalgia flooded over me.

Ponta Delgada, the main town, also felt familiar in some ways, with its Baroque-fronted mansions, green shutters and black-and-white cobbled squares. But then I noticed its walls and church towers, built of thick black basalt and a honeycombed lava stone that mirrored the volcanic landscape. São Miguel used to be two islands until a few hundred thousand years ago when gargantuan eruptions joined together a pair of volcanic massifs. I mulled over its origins as I headed out to the island’s eastern side with guide Jos Haagmans, the first of several people to tell me that ‘Azoreans have ash and salt in the blood’.

Along the way I got an inkling of what this adage meant as we careened along a coastal road cloven with crispy-looking inlets and capes where lava had flowed to the ocean and cooled. We then swung inland, twisting to the rim of Furnas crater. Below was a lake of silky turquoise fringed with pines, but I only had to blink to see how illusory this placid image was. Just a stone’s throw from the shore, I peered into a fiery netherworld of smoking fumaroles and hissing vents that wafted fetid fumes into the ether. Ominously, this was also where my lunch was currently being cooked.

The area’s anomalous delicacy, cozido das Furnas, involves lowering enormous metal pots filled with beef, bits of pig, chicken, cabbage and yams into burning wells in the Earth’s bowels. Six hours later, they are hauled out on pulleys and claimed by local restaurateurs. It’s not exactly fast food.

At lunchtime, on a sunny balcony at Tony’s restaurant in nearby Furnas town, I concluded that meat reeking of sulphur and swimming in acrid juices was an acquired taste. How else to explain the local diners tucking in like a world-ending magma discharge was about to happen tomorrow? I wondered if Twain had been soured by a similar dining experience.

Breaking free of the past

From my window seat on the propeller plane to Faial, I had an amazing view of the perfectly conical summit of the 2,351m-high Mount Pico. Portugal’s highest point was poking through a duvet of cloud covering the island that bears its name. The other four spits of land that make up the Azores central cluster looked like bobbing toys in a bathtub by comparison.

I had decided on visiting Faial mainly because I was intrigued by the Capelinhos headland and its extraordinary genesis. However, I had to admit to feeling uneasy about another aspect of the island’s recent past: whaling. The ghastly practice of harpooning, lancing and dragging sperm whales ashore was a mainstay of Faial’s economy until the late 1980s, when it was outlawed. The legacy of this time is still visible across the island, from the vigias – stone turrets from where cries to action would ring out when a spout of water was spotted – to town fountains decorated with blue azulejo tile paintings of whalers. At Capelinhos I even found roofless whalers’ cottages half buried in ash from the 1957 eruption, while the remains of the terrifyingly tiny wooden boats that they used for hunting were left to rot on an abandoned slipway.

What interested me more was how the islands had moved on. Horta, Faial’s breezy little port, used to be one of the main whaling hubs. The old quayside blubber-processing factory has since been turned into an undeniably interesting museum that shines a light on its former industry. But the real bounty, nowadays, is that the Azores are among the top places in the world for eco-tours to watch cetaceans. As well as sperm whales, a recorded 27 other species are either native to, or migrate through, these waters. Humpbacks, minkes and pilot whales are all sighted regularly, so my hopes were high as I strode along the Horta quay where yachts clinked and bucked alongside the RIB that was being readied to take a handful of us out whale spotting.
Unfortunately, the conditions suddenly turned, and skipper Pedro Felipe was looking bothered. “It’s very choppy out to sea. I do not believe that we will see whales today – only dolphins,” he warned.

Only dolphins? Our boat was barely out of the harbour when the first grey backs began to arc in and out of our bow wave. The more Pedro revved the engine, the faster the dolphins leapt, rocketing out of the sea as we bounced along.

Over the next three hours, we encountered pod after pod of bottlenoses, plus a few common and striped dolphins. From time to time we would idle the engine to drift and pitch on the swell while the creatures regrouped. They were constantly diving and surfacing, so I couldn’t begin to guess how many there were in the water, but they seemed to be scrutinising us as much as the other way round.

“We are supposed to keep a distance, but what can you do when the animals have other ideas?” smiled Pedro, who was recording scientific data on the various marine life that we encountered.

I will surely return one day to meet the islands’ celebrated whales, but the marine mammals I met that afternoon were wonders that will take some beating. Only dolphins, eh?