Journey 02 · Azores
The Green Island of Fog
São Miguel, Faial, Pico
Published 3 Oct 2025 · Travelled 28 Aug – 8 Sept 2025
- 9 moments
- 12 days
- 435 km
- Summer
- Portugal
- 38mm · f/8 · 1/500
- 37.8300° N, 25.5300° W
- Roll one, frame 06 — Portra 400
- The north coast, near Santa Iria
- 10:40
- 22°C, sun between cloud
I had seen photographs and still got it wrong. The north coast of São Miguel is farmed right to the edge of the cliff, in small walled fields, and every one of them is a different green because the pasture, the maize and the hydrangea hedges are all doing separate things. Portra makes this look invented. It is not.
- 38mm · f/11 · 1/250
- 37.8556° N, 25.7811° W
- Roll two, frame 11
- Vista do Rei, Sete Cidades
- 08:15
- 17°C, clear early
The crater at Sete Cidades has a blue lake and a green lake in it, side by side, joined by a bridge, and the colours are genuinely different — it is the depth and the weed, not a story. I got there at eight and had the rim to myself for twenty minutes. By nine there were four coaches and the cloud had come over the far wall anyway.
- 38mm · f/4 · 1/250
- 37.7700° N, 25.3100° W
- Roll four, frame 27
- A lane above Furnas
- 13:30
- 24°C, warm, damp
Hydrangeas here are not decorative, they are a boundary — they were planted to divide fields and they have taken over every roadside on the island. In late August they are past their best and still absurd. I stood in a lane above Furnas for ten minutes waiting for a car so there would be something in it apart from flowers, and no car came.
04 · What I carried and what the ferries do
- 38mm · f/11 · 1/500
- 37.8189° N, 25.4711° W
- Roll six, frame 19
- Lagoa do Fogo
- 09:20
- 16°C, clear above the cloud
Lagoa do Fogo sits in an old crater with no village and no road down to it, and the rim road is shut in fog about half the time. I drove up three times. On the third the fog was under me instead of around me, and the water went a green I have not managed to describe to anybody since without sounding like a paint catalogue.
- Listen
- Lagoa das Furnas
- 07:05
- 15°C, mist, no wind
Furnas lake early, before the vans come to dig up the lunch. There is a wooden jetty going out about twenty metres and the mist was sitting on the water so the far shore had gone. What I stopped for was the sound — coots, a long way off, and the boards flexing under someone else's feet behind me, and then nothing for maybe a minute.
- 38mm · f/8 · 1/500
- 38.5089° N, 28.5333° W
- Roll nine, frames 08 and 21
- 38mm · f/8 · 1/500
- 38.5089° N, 28.5333° W
- Roll nine, frames 08 and 21
- Criação Velha, Pico
- 16:20
- 23°C, clear, hot
The volcano is 2,351 metres and the island is basically its base, so it is either the whole horizon or entirely absent. On the day it was out I drove the coast road with cattle grazing in the foreground of everything, which is the actual proportion of the place. The vineyards are the other half — black basalt walls a metre high in a grid, built to keep the salt wind off the vines.
- 38mm · f/4 · 1/250
- 38.5300° N, 28.5250° W
- Roll ten, frame 15
- The Madalena road, Pico
- 12:40
- 21°C, haze, flat light
I want to be accurate about the ratio. Twelve days, and I saw the summit five of them. The rest was driving with the wipers on intermittent past white houses with red shutters, glancing left every thirty seconds at where the mountain would be. This is through the windscreen, parked, engine off, waiting again.
- Praia do Norte and Horta, Faial
- 15:50
- 21°C, clear, cooling
- Last frame
A boat pulled up on stones under a cliff on the north side of Faial, with nobody near it, at the point where I had stopped looking for photographs and was just walking. Then the harbour at Horta that evening, water gone the colour of the inside of a shell, the yacht crews painting their names on the sea wall the way everyone does. Roll thirteen, ends there.
- 38mm · f/5.6 · 1/125
- 38.5322° N, 28.6256° W
- Roll thirteen, frames 35 and 36
The route
9 stops
Journey completed
Twelve days, nine stories
- Distance walked
- 54 km
- Frames exposed
- 468
- Rolls shot
- 13
- Islands
- 3
- Times Pico was visible
- 5 of 12 days
- Favourite moment
- The ferry channel at dusk with Pico behind us and nobody on deck
- Best food
- Beef stewed underground in a volcanic vent at Furnas, dug up at half past twelve, eaten at one
