The Azores

The Azores were uninhabited when Portuguese navigators reached them in the 1420s and 1430s, and settlement began soon after, with colonists from mainland Portugal and a group of Flemish settlers on the central islands. Their mid-Atlantic position made them strategically valuable: the Spanish treasure fleets sheltered and reprovisioned here on the way back from the Americas, and Angra do Heroísmo on Terceira became a fortified imperial port, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

For centuries the islands lived from oranges (a major export to Britain until disease struck), wheat, wine, and whaling — open-boat hunting of sperm whales from lookout stations, continued until the 1980s. Poverty, land pressure, and volcanic disasters, such as the 1957–58 Capelinhos eruption on Faial that buried farmland and a lighthouse, drove waves of emigration, chiefly to Massachusetts, Rhode Island, California, and Ontario; today far more people of Azorean descent live in North America than in the archipelago.

After the 1974 revolution in Portugal, the Azores became an autonomous region with their own parliament and government, keeping Portuguese sovereignty, the euro, and EU membership. Air-service liberalisation in 2015 brought low-cost flights and a tourism boom built on the islands' green landscapes, whales, and geothermal spas, alongside the mainstay dairy and beef farming that supplies much of Portugal's milk.

Azorean culture is rural, Catholic, and devout, and its most visible expression is the Holy Ghost (Espírito Santo) festival — a cycle of processions, communal soup meals, and the crowning of a symbolic "emperor", centred on small painted chapels (impérios) found in villages across the islands, and carried by emigrants to North America. The Senhor Santo Cristo procession in Ponta Delgada draws enormous crowds.

Emigration and return shape the islands: money, ideas, and North American English flow back with visiting relatives, and many families straddle two continents. Community life is strong, with folk music (including the Azorean viola da terra, a heart-shaped guitar), bullfights on a rope in Terceira's streets (touradas à corda), and a slow, weather-conscious rhythm.

Hospitality is warm and food-centred, the pace is unhurried, and there is a quiet pride in the archipelago's distinctness from the mainland.

About 240,000 people live in the Azores, roughly half on São Miguel; the smallest island, Corvo, has only a few hundred. The population has been broadly stable, with tourism and returning emigrants offsetting the long outflow of young people.

The economy rests on farming — the islands are a dairy powerhouse for Portugal — along with fishing, tourism, and the public sector, supported by EU funds and mainland transfers. São Miguel also grows pineapples in greenhouses and has Europe's only commercial tea plantations, at Gorreana and Porto Formoso.

Everyday life is centred on the village, the parish, the farm or the sea, and the constant negotiation with a climate that can deliver sun, rain, wind, and fog in a single afternoon.

Azorean cooking is simple, hearty, and shaped by volcanic ground and the sea. The signature dish is cozido das Furnas on São Miguel — beef, pork, sausage, chicken, cabbage, and potatoes packed into a pot and lowered into a steaming hole in the ground beside the Furnas hot springs, then cooked for hours by geothermal heat. Terceira's version, alcatra, is a beef pot roast cooked slowly in a clay dish with wine and spices.

From the sea come lapas (limpets grilled with garlic butter), cracas (goose barnacles), fresh tuna and bluefish, and caldeirada fish stew. Queijo São Jorge, a sharp cow's-milk cheese, and bolo lêvedo, a soft griddled sweet muffin, are eaten across the islands, and Azorean beef, grazed on lush pasture, is prized on the mainland.

Pico and Biscoitos produce distinctive volcanic-vineyard wines, the verdelho whites in particular; passion-fruit and pineapple liqueurs are local specialities; and the regional sodas Kima and Gazosa and the Melo Abreu and Especial beers are the everyday drinks.

São Miguel, the largest island, holds the headline sights: the blue-and-green twin lakes of Sete Cidades in a caldera; the deep bowl of Lagoa do Fogo; and the Furnas valley, with its bubbling caldeiras, the botanical Terra Nostra thermal pool, and the buried cozido lunch. Ponta Delgada is the main town, and the Gorreana tea estate and pineapple greenhouses are nearby.

Pico, in the central group, is dominated by its 2,351-metre volcano — the highest mountain in Portugal, climbed overnight for a sunrise summit — with a UNESCO-listed landscape of black-lava vineyard walls at its foot and superb whale-watching offshore. Faial has the yacht harbour at Horta, its quay painted by transatlantic sailors, Peter Café Sport, and the ash desert and drowned lighthouse of Capelinhos. São Jorge is a long ridge dropping to flat coastal fajãs.

Terceira has the Renaissance streets of Angra do Heroísmo and the vast Algar do Carvão lava cave. Far to the west, Flores is the greenest island, hung with waterfalls, and tiny Corvo is a single crater with one village — the edge of Europe.