The new allure of the Azores

By Christine Richard

Just four hours from Boston lies a bit of Old World Europe that Americans have yet to discover. In the Azores, you can find crater lakes, ancient walking paths and renovated stone houses. What you won’t find (yet) are crowds.

The jet engine revs on the single, sunbaked runway. It is, at this moment, the loudest sound in the town of Santa Cruz on Flores, nearly drowNing out what the woman behind the ticket counter — Neatly combed hair, red lipstick, ironed blue uniform — is saying to me.

“Oh, it’s a pity,” she starts calmly, in such a way that you know she doesn’t really think it’s a pity at all. “That’s your plane. You should have been here an hour ago. Your flight was rescheduled.”

On cue, the plane’s buzz swells overhead, fades to the east, and then … silence, that particular kind of silence that always seems to follow a monumental gaffe. Like missing a plane when you are standing on a speck of land in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. For Flores, part of Portugal’s Azores chain, is only served by one airline and that carrier makes just one flight per day here … at least midweek in May.

In fact, when the plane zoomed across the blue sky about an hour and a half ago, Silvio Medina, my guide, was driving me through the island’s green interior, and he registered the event as peculiar. His exact words might have been, “Hmmm, the plane. It’s early.” Maybe we should have rushed to the airport then. But I had been busy counting waterfalls. They rush and trickle down cliff faces so frequently that it’s like the island is springing leaks. Now, with 30 hours before the next flight out, according to the woman behind the counter, I can, I think merrily, continue my counting game. A quiet day at the edge of the Old World. Perfect. I call Silvio on his mobile.

I’d come to the Azores, a chain of nine islands strung across 400 miles in the Atlantic Ocean, drawn to its seafaring history and wine-and-cheese culture. These islands have figured prominently on navigational charts for centuries, and they have old stone farmhouses, beautiful hikes, world famous cheeses and lava wine. Also, there are almost no tourists. While doing my pretrip research, I had come across a description of the tiny island of Flores, the westernmost point of Europe. One inn’s Web site claimed that the island was so tranquil that “you can almost hear the sound of the sun falling against the horizon.” This silent world, it had turned out, was only a four-hour flight from Boston. I hadn’t known, however, that it would be so difficult to leave Flores.

Silvio meets me and we forge our way across the island. Rocks are blanketed in liverwort and moss. Ferns grow wild. Forests of Japanese cedars carpet hillsides. The air smells green. In the deep summer, though, Flores is a puff of blue. That’s when the hydrangeas bloom and frame the mountain roads. Flores has two seasons, it seems: green and blue. Silvio tells me that Flores, however, is not named after the prolific hydrangea, but after a yellow flower, the cubre. Neither is native: Both are “I was here” gestures scattered by late 15th-century explorers who stopped in on their way from the Old World to the New. Japanese cedars, Brazilian lantana, Asian camellias and African dragon trees, pieces of the entire world germinate here.

Silvio and I, with nothing but time before us, stop at the many miradouros, or viewpoints. I like the Flores style of sightseeing: Silvio applies the brakes, puts the car in park, and turns off the engine in the middle of the road. We walk over to a cliff — it seems we’re always looking at the sea or a church tower from at least 600 feet in the air — and I snap a shot on my Olympus. No one ever comes to beep his horn. We climb back in, slam the doors, drive a half-mile, then brake.

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