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Published: July 14th 2015
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Our first port of call on the second circumnavigation, and a real delight, was the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores . We thought this would be a collection of volcanic rocks in the Atlantic, but it's really quite amazing. The Azores (officially the Autonomous Region of the Azores) is one of two autonomous regions of Portugal (the other being Madeira). The archipelago comprises 9 islands in the North Atlantic Ocean about 1,360 kilometres (850 miles) west of mainland Portugal, about 1,643 km (1,021 miles) west of Lisbon in mainland Portugal about 1,507 kilometres (936 miles) northwest of Morocco, and about 1,925 kilometres (1,196 miles) southeast of Newfoundland, Canada.
Its main industries are agriculture, farming, fishing and tourism which is becoming the major service activity in the region. In addition, the government of the Azores employs a large percentage of the population directly or indirectly in the service and tertiary sectors. The capital city of the Azores is Ponta Delgada which is where we berthed. There are nine major Azorean islands and an islet cluster, in three main groups. These are Flores and
Corvo, to the west; Graciosa, Terceira, São Jorge, Pico, and Faial in the centre; and São Miguel, Santa
Maria and the Formigas Reef to the east. They extend for more than 600 kilometres (370 miles) and lie in a northwest-southeast direction.
Ponta Delgada (PD), is on São Miguel (the largest island in the group). Clearly volcanic, on our approach to the cruise terminal, we could see the various cones, all at relatively low level from our approach. PD is a long settled town going back to the 1500's and characterized like many places in volcanic areas with much 'black and white' architecture. We took a ship's tour to the Ribeira Grande and the Fire Lake (Lagoa do Fogo
) which, as it happened, was a wise decision.
We first went around PD on the dual carriageway by-pass and turned off to a small village where there was a pineapple plantation under glass. Given that the islands have an equitable climate, rather like the Canaries - but for all that, definitely not sub-tropical, it seemed strange, given they could grow so many crops, that they were 'going Dutch' and growing hot weather fruit under glass. There were about a dozen or so huge green houses all with pineapples at various stages of development. The other disadvantage of growing
pineapples, is that even in the Caribbean it's a twelve month growing period for a single fruit which is followed by a need to propagate for the next crop. In the Azores it takes 24 months, so when you next purchase a £1 pineapple, think of all the effort that goes into it! Needless to say, though, there was a motive in taking us to this place which was to flog pineapple liqueur which M found too sweet and D found too early in the morning.
Afterwards we crossed the island at its narrowest point (about 12 kilometres wide) to the north coast. The scenery was most unusual and, perhaps, more like rural Britain than anywhere we have previously been to. The most British features were very green grassy fields, narrow, windy roads, dry stone walls enclosing smallish fields and many rural buildings and small settlements which could easily have been Cornwall or Wales. Quite odd. Over the ridge, we then went down to the only other largish town on São Miguel which is called Ribeira Grande (Big River). This was situated just inland from the mouth of the river in a fairly steep, incised, valley and again was
of a certain vintage with three or four old churches, an eight arch high road viaduct over the river and a neat municipal park and Tourist Information office positioned down the sides of the valley. It was neatly clipped and manicured in the public areas but a little more sleazy in the back streets, but nonetheless authentic in a Portuguese sort of way. We liked the town and needless to say the man in the Tourist Office spoke perfect English. We Brits really are pathetic in our attempts to speak to any foreigner in their own language. We walked down the valley and under the arches to a very wild Atlantic Ocean with breakers about two metres high and much detritus washed up on the beach - most of it plastic these days. (Even between Phuket and Pinang on the last leg, twenty kilometres out to sea we were amazed at the incidence of plastic/polystyrene rubbish in the water (even though it's illegal to dump plastic at sea).
After a half hour in Ribeira Grande we proceeded to climb one of the volcanoes in our small bus. We wound our way up a wooded valley, and, as we passed
a small car park, our guide commented that at the end of a ten minute forest walk was a small waterfall and a pool with warm water that many visitors bathe in (a clue as to what was to come). Ten minutes up the valley all became apparent as the mountain positively steamed. There were geysers and a number of industrial establishments. These turned out to be the Azores thermal electricity company. We understand that bores are made hundreds of metres into the mountain and the volcanic heat is used to generate electricity. Our guide informed us that about 40 percent of the island's electricity is derived from this source. Most interesting.
As we approached to top of the climb - and as we said, not particularly high - we passed over the crater lip and got a magnificent view of the caldera and crater lake. The sun was shining strongly at an acute angle and the declination back to the south of the island was such that it appeared the water just ran over the crater lake and straight into the sea which was about 600 metres below. This was an illusion as it was about 6 kilometres
away! The weather was closing in and as we climbed higher up the rim we unfortunately passed straight into the cloud and lost all views until we hit the top and came down the other side. This was scenically even more British, unbelievably green and small scale.
We returned to the ship via the suburbs of PG some of which had nice, smallish beaches and hotels. The sand, though, was black. We re-boarded the MSVG and left early afternoon after a very interesting and enjoyable day.
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