A century on from the publication of Raul Brandão classic As Ilhas Desconhecidas (“The Unknown Islands”), a contemporary traveler takes a close look at Portugal’s famed mid-Atlantic archipelago and discovers the price the locals still pay for living in paradise.
“Morning! I’m Silvio. Hop in.”
Silvio is early. Surprisingly so, in fact, given the relaxed approach to punctuality that so often precedes any rendezvous here on the Azores. Maybe his years in America were a bad influence on him. Whatever the cause, I hadn’t expected to hear his taxi trundling up the hill so soon.
He shakes my hand and then gives me a questioning thumbs up. “Good to go?”
I slap the rucksack and return the gesture. “Good to go. Traveling light today.”
The taxi trundles back down the hill. We turn west, and the village of Santa Cruz das Flores fades away behind us.
“Man, you’re lucky. If you wanted to do this yesterday, I don’t know if I would have been able to pick you up. I only got my car fixed last night. I had to order a special part from Germany, and it took weeks to get here.”
“That long, even within Europe?”
“For sure. Things move slowly here. First, they need to get the part back in stock in Germany. From there, it goes to Lisbon. From there to São Miguel, and then out to us by boat. And if the weather is bad and the boat can’t come… well, you just gotta wait. And then wait and wait and wait. No Amazon Prime out here.”
Silvio is a native of here. Born—although not entirely raised—on this westernmost peak of the immense underwater mountain range that breaks the surface of the mid-Atlantic, forming the Azores archipelago. Like many Azoreans, his family had emigrated to the United States at one point. Unlike many Azoreans, they had returned. His English is confident and polished, a mellifluous mix of Lusophone consonants and New England vowels.
We climb into the interior of the island, the road clinging to precipitous hillsides and wending its way between water-filled calderas, remnants of the antediluvian convulsions that birthed this lonely outpost of humanity in the middle of the ocean. We pull in between a pair of them that have been christened Lagoa Funda (“Deep”) and Lagoa Comprida (“Long”) and survey the next step.
Silvio points to a path that skirts the water’s edge. “See that? Just follow it all the way around to the other side of the crater, then go up the hill.”
He moves his finger to indicate a ridge off in the distance.
“Once you reach the top of that, you’ll see the ocean. It’s an easy downhill walk all the way there. You’ll be in Fajã Grande in three hours, tops.”
I kick the toes of my boots against the ground to make sure they’re laced tight enough.
“Sounds good. See you on the other side.”
***
In the summer of 1924, Portuguese writer and journalist Raul Brandão arrived on the Azores. These distant, enigmatic islands—then a five-day sea voyage from mainland Portugal—had long occupied a romantic spot in his imagination; so, having recently established himself as an author of note, Brandão set off to conduct, in his own words, “an interview with the Azores.” Starting his journey on Corvo, the smallest and northernmost of the archipelago, which he described with a measure of trepidation as “nothing but a rock and the wind in the vast solitude of the Atlantic,” Brandão gradually island-hopped his way east over the course of the next two months. The notes and observations he made were subsequently published as As Ilhas Desconhecidas (The Unknown Islands), now considered a classic of Portuguese travel literature.
I had picked up a translated edition in a small bookshop on São Miguel, the largest of the Azores, where the commercial flights from the Portuguese mainland arrive. Now, over four hundred miles to the west at the far end of the archipelago, I carry it with me in my rucksack. It is the dying days of winter.
The island of Flores was named for its abundance of flowers, in particular the hydrangeas that burst forth in late April and temporarily annex it into a tie-dye kingdom of blues and purples and pinks and reds. The campaigning season has not yet begun, however, and even the vanguard remains asleep beneath the soil, gathering strength for this year’s coming surge of short-lived botanical revanchism. But there is still color. Black water. White fog. Red soil. Gray shale. Blue sky, beckoning as I climb upwards and out of the caldera. And then green. So much green. Green all the way to the sea.
In the introduction he wrote for The Unknown Islands, the poet Urbano Bettencourt observed that Brandão, a painter as well as a writer, had an eye for color. During his time on Flores, he often remarked on the subtle hues of green that one encounters here. Gentle green, light green, voluptuous green, deep green, molten greenish-blue, very green, dark green, black green.
I stand atop a peak of dark green, ready to descend into the light.
But first, lunch.
I find a welcoming tuft of grass to sit on and pull the sandwich from my rucksack.
***
Europe is a strange beast. More concept than continent, with heartlands and boundaries that shift dramatically depending on which definition of “Europe” one chooses to adhere to.
Since the eastern and southern frontiers were so long seen as the dividing lines between civilization and barbarity, these are the ones upon which the most ink has been spilled. Anaximander considered the Phasis River (the modern Rioni River in Georgia) to be the border of Europe in the east. For Ptolemy, it was the river Tanais (the modern Don). For Swedish geographer Philip Johan von Strahlenberg, the Volga. Nowadays, the Ural Mountains are often used as a convenient marker of where Europe ends and Asia begins, despite them being less than significant as either a cultural or physical boundary. You could conceivably drive over the Urals without even realizing you’ve done so.
A decisive westernmost point is scarcely any easier to define. The discussion is immediately complicated by the various overseas territories still administered by the likes of Britain, the Netherlands, and France. In the case of the latter, many of these territories—like Guadeloupe and French Guiana—have the same political status as a region of mainland France, as integral a part of the nation as Paris or Marseilles. If one ever wants to court rapturous acclaim while organizing a pub quiz, one need only include a question that requires the participants to name all the countries bordering France. And then refuse to accept any answer that doesn’t include Brazil.
Does Europe’s westernmost point, then, lie somewhere in South America? Or in the middle of the Pacific in French Polynesia, which would place it so far west as to be almost east again? Or, as Silvio had told me on the drive up, in the sleepy village of Fajã Grande (population 202) that lies at the end of this hiking trail? Fajã Grande, which is culturally and politically part of Portugal, and is unambiguously the westernmost extent of that nation, but which is also technically located on the North American tectonic plate.
It is a Schrödinger’s Cat of a statement. Simultaneously true and untrue depending on what one’s own definition of Europe is.
I pack up my lunch and continue walking west towards the sea.
***
In summer, Silvio had said, Fajã Grande is packed with visitors who come to hike and fish and dive. Anyone who neglects to make a dinner reservation at one of the village’s few restaurants will often have to wait two to three hours before a table becomes available. During these hectic months, Silvio and his taxi are busy from dawn till dusk, shuttling people—typically German hikers—between Flores’ various trail heads and scenic viewpoints. This seasonal influx of revenue is the island’s life blood.
I am by all appearances the only visitor in Fajã Grande today, although the lone tent pitched in the camping area hints that I may have a counterpart wandering the hills somewhere. The restaurants are shuttered, biding their time for the arrival of the summer hordes later in the year. A solitary snack bar offers francesinha and bifana. I buy a bottle of beer and bring it down to the beach, where, during the warmer months, people swim in natural rock pools carved out by the ceaseless barrage of the Atlantic.
It is warm already. So much so that I feel the need to sit in the shade of one such rock in order to avoid the ignominy of yet another winter sunburn. Between sips, I close my eyes and listen to the waves.
***
“Well, how was it?”
I toss my rucksack into the back of Silvio’s taxi and hop into the passenger seat. “Really nice. The view from the top is amazing. I could see all the way to Corvo.”
We pull away and start heading back east.
“Yeah, you got lucky with the weather today,” Silvio proclaims. “It’s not a good idea to be up there when it’s rainy. The clouds come in quickly, and you can get lost really easily. But today? You probably could have seen all the way to America!”
“So this is unusually good for winter?”
Silvio takes one hand off the wheel and shakes it in a so-so gesture. “Kind of. You get beautiful days like this, and then you might have wind and rain for weeks. If you look at a thermometer, it never gets really cold on paper, but man, sometimes the wind just gets into your bones.”
When one reads Raul Brandão’s account of his journey across the Azores, one is struck—as he was—by the vicious weather that routinely lashes the islands. Standing on the shore as the Atlantic winds are fulminating, it is not difficult to imagine how sporadic inter-island communication must have been in the days when the only method of travel was by boat. As Brandão himself noted, not even the açor, the wily goshawk after which the Azores were named, dares to make the long journey across open sea to the western islands of Corvo and Flores.
Even the fifteen-mile channel between Corvo and Flores could be remarkably dangerous, with dead fish routinely washing up on the beach in winter, battered against some offshore islet as the wind churned the sea into a frenzy. In the pre-modern era, communication between the two neighboring islands during those turbulent months was often limited to the simplest of messages, conveyed via the lighting of beacons on high ground.
I recall Brandão’s almost shell-shocked accounts of the violent gales in this western part of the Azores. Wind so strong that it stripped the earth of its flesh. A rampaging, invisible entity that rang church bells and could devastate months of work in an instant.
“We sow and the wind blows it away!
It is the most powerful force in the world!”
I think of the abandoned farmhouses and ruined water mills I had passed on my way down from the hills. Life on these far-flung islands, subject to the whims of whichever of the mid-Atlantic anemoi happened to be raging that day, has never been easy. For generations, a rite of passage for Azorean men was to hitch a ride on whichever passing whaling boat was heading west to America. Flores is not, nor has it ever been, quite as brutally austere as neighboring Corvo, but it is nonetheless incredibly remote, with all the accompanying challenges that entails. Nowadays, many young Florentinos still head “abroad” to study or work on São Miguel or in Lisbon. Of every ten that leave, Silvio says, only two might return. In the tourist off-season, he supplements his income by driving children to school in his taxi; on most parts of the island, there are simply no longer enough children left to warrant a school bus.
“Do many non-local people ever move here? From the sound of it, you get a lot of tourists in summer. There are probably a few of them who fall in love and want to come and put down roots here.”
“Oh yeah, we get those. Or at least people who say they do.” Silvio shakes his head. “But they always have this really idealized view of how life will be here. They’re on Flores for maybe two or three days at the height of summer, and they think it’s paradise. Maybe even a good place to retire. But actually living here is different.”
“And it’s hard to find work, I imagine?”
“Exactly! If you don’t want to be a farmer or a fisherman, what are you gonna do? Even if you work with tourists, you’ll live really well for three months and then have nothing for the next nine. And if you’re old and retired already, well, there are three doctors here for three thousand people. What’s gonna happen when you fall or get sick?”
He shakes his head again and gestures out at the landscape.
“Look, I love it here, I absolutely do. It really is like paradise in so many ways. It’s so beautiful. The people are friendly. The food is so fresh. The pace of life is slow and relaxed. There is basically no crime. But it’s tough. Live here for a full year first, then tell me you want to move. I’ll help you out!”
We round the southern edge of the island, passing through the port village of Lajes das Flores. That name rings a bell.
“Speaking of bad weather, I think I read somewhere that the harbor here was badly damaged by a storm a few years ago?”
“Not just damaged – completely destroyed. It was before COVID. I think 2019. A hurricane hit the entire Azores, but we took a particularly bad beating here. None of the big supply ships could land afterwards, so the military had to use helicopters to air-drop crates of flour so the bakeries could make bread.”
“What, you mean you couldn’t get it shipped in by Amazon Prime?”
Silvio laughs.
“You pay a price for living in paradise.”
