Big surprises on the Azores

Uma reportagem do "The Daily Telegraph"

Na sua edição de 08/09/2007 o jornalista Nicholas Roe, fala da sua visita a três ilhas dos Açores, transcrevo abaixo o excerto sobre o Faial:


Faial

"I took a 25-minute ferry ride from Pico to nearby Faial. Short distance, big difference. This tiny, lush island (15 miles long) moves to a more international beat than Pico, thanks to two factors.

This is where communication cables between Europe and America were controlled at the start of the 20th century - a function that guaranteed foreign influence until the 1960s when satellite technology took over.

Next came the yachties.There is a large and jolly marina in the main town of Horta, that caters in a relaxed fashion to trans-Atlantic sailors desperate for a drink after weeks at sea. The tradition is that visiting crews paint pictures on the harbourside before setting off again, and thousands splatter the front. This is also where you find Peter's Café Sport, internationally famous as a yachties' meeting-point: a homely enough place with dodgy service but a sense of cosmopolitan bustle and a musuem of scrimshaw - handicrafts produced by sailors in their spare time - upstairs.

But the real surprise lies beyond Horta or the dozen quiet villages that dot the island's coastal rim. Wildflowers and hydrangeas are gorgeously noticeable elsewhere, but here they smack you right in the eye. Whole field systems are divided by the shrubs, adding a beautiful blue perspective to the rolling views.

Faial is also the island that suffered the most recent major volcanic eruption, 50 years ago. At Capelinhos on the west coast you can still see house roofs jutting out from banked-up soil. Almost a square mile of new land rears starkly from the sea, the result of that lava-spewing upthrust. At low tide, the water boils.

Here, I met a returning Azorean who described scrambling up the volcano as a naughty boy shortly after it had "stopped" erupting. Except that it hadn't. A fresh explosion sent him scuttling home in terror, after which his family left for America, only now returning.

This is just the kind of off-beat surprise you can expect to find on the Azores: a local bystander happy to tell you all about his boyhood encounter with a live volcano."

Aqui fica o link, pois fala também sobre as ilhas de São Miguel e do Pico:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/main.jhtml?xml=/travel/2007/09/08/et-azores-108.xml&page=1