Flores: the wild island at Europe’s western fringe

Europe’s final scrap of land before America sticks out of the Atlantic like a shark’s fin. Monchique, a rocky, uninhabited islet, lies at the furthest extreme of the Azores archipelago. It’s part of Portugal, but Lisbon is only a few miles closer than Newfoundland in Canada.

Eleven of us, a group of family and friends from Lisbon, had long expressed a wish to travel to the outer reaches of the country. And now we have definitively reached it, bobbing up and down just off the islet in a small boat. There is nothing left to do but dive in.

As the sea eddies and bubbles round the steep sides of the black basaltic rock, we finally pluck up the courage to jump, experiencing the thrill of being nothing but specks in the middle of the Atlantic. The water is clear and fresh. Hugo, the boat’s skipper, tells us of the rich biodiversity around the islet and its scuba diving potential. From our vantage point, floating near the boat, we gaze back across the waves at the majestic sweep of the island of Flores, the focus of our trip.

Getting there isn’t easy: it has taken a day’s travel, and two flights, to get from Lisbon to the little airport in Santa Cruz das Flores, the regional capital on the east coast. (Flores is 136 miles west of the Azores’ central group of five islands, further than mainland Portugal is wide.) The runway is a rare flat piece of land on a volcanic island full of craters, wild rock formations and waterfalls as well as verdant hills that burst with pink and blue hydrangeas. Flores is 10 miles long, seven across at its widest point, and has a population of fewer than 3,500.

On our arrival, we drive from Santa Cruz through the middle of the island, past the highest peak of Morro Alto, 915m above sea level, to reach our home for the week, just outside Fajã Grande. It is sometimes referred to as the westernmost village in Europe — and there’s a wooden signpost displaying that claim — although it depends a bit on definitions (pub quizzers note: Flores actually sits on the North American plate, while the EU extends as far as the Caribbean island of Saint Martin).

The term fajã means an area of flat coastal land created from cliff falls or lava flows. Fajã Grande, with its whitewashed houses, terracotta roofs and cobbled streets, lies between the sea and the imposing Rocha da Fajã, an almost sheer escarpment that rises nearly 600m and serves as a natural boundary from the rest of the island, waterfalls cascading down from its heights.

I discovered the word fajã on my first visit to the Azores 21 years ago, when I was seven months’ pregnant. Then my ocean trips were limited. This time round, I do not hold back and, now with my grown son Oliver, embrace every adventure with gusto, including canyoning through rivers and waterfalls. The most striking, and accessible, of the Rocha da Fajã cascades is the Poço do Bacalhau (in English the Cod’s Well). The sun doesn’t hit its plunge pool until early afternoon so when we head there in the mornings we have it to ourselves. Gallons of water pound my head from above. I leave the shampoo at home since the volcanic minerals make my hair softer than it has ever been. 

Nearby a beach of dark pebbles beckons and we run down to the sea, keen to swim to the other side of the bay. The water sparkles, inviting us in.

But, as we look closer, those pretty iridescent bubbles are not reflections of the sun. Rather they are tiny killers: Portuguese man o’ war, or caravelas. Violet-tinged floats sit on the surface and catch the wind; below, the tentacles can reach as far as 30m, with venom to kill fish and deliver a nasty sting to humans. I’ve never seen anything like them as they gather in a swarm, a blotch of pink on the blue sea, mesmerising but dangerous. We decided to postpone our swimming plans.

Like the caravelas we travel en masse, floating about Flores according to the light and the weather. We squeeze into a rented car and a van to see, film and photograph the lush forests and the seven lakes that sit in volcanic calderas. We drive up the bumpy dirt road to the radio station at the summit of Morro Alto. We go to see the Rocha dos Bordões, where volcanic trachybasalt has formed into tall vertical columns. We pose before the waterfalls at Poço da Ribeira do Ferreiro. Much to the exasperation of my kids, we visit the same places at least twice to catch different times of the day and weather. 

Ships usually supply the supermarkets of Flores each fortnight but storms can delay deliveries and, for much of our visit, shelves are all but bare. We scratch out a few meals but most of the time we eat out. Our favourite meal was at the rustic Pôr do Sol restaurant along the road from the small town of Fajãzinha, where we enjoyed grilled lapas, or rockclams, octopus and the joy of a sunset over the wide ocean. 

Other summer visitors join us noisily in the evening. Cagarros, or Cory’s shearwater birds, which have come to the islands to nest, call out to each other with a joyful throaty “eow eow eow ahh” that makes us laugh. 

We take a day trip by boat from Santa Cruz to Corvo, the smallest island in the Azores, 12 miles off the north coast of Flores. It has only room for one small town (and a runway) for its population of less than 400. At its core lies Caldeirão, a vast volcanic caldera with a lake inside that has several islands; it is easily among Portugal’s most striking landscapes.

A taxi takes us up the island’s only paved road to the top of the crater and we spend about five hours hiking down into the crater and around the lake. Hydrangeas splash the sides with colour while cows and horses calmly graze.  

Another day we make our excursion to Monchique and, after our last-stop-before-America swim, skipper Hugo steers the boat along Flores’s western coastline, stopping to show us hidden caves and bays, then diving in himself to spear a fish. He goes again and again and after five minutes we have enough for dinner. No need to rely too much on the supermarket this time.

A morning of bad weather persuades us to turn our backs on the natural world and head to some of the island’s museums, one in a former Franciscan convent in Santa Cruz and another near the water’s edge. There we learn about the whaling tactics that the islanders passed on to the Americans and the piracy, privateers and postal services that made the Azores an essential mid-ocean stop. Pictures of battles and heroes of old adorn the walls, including Sir Richard Grenville, whose part in the 16th century battle that pitted one English ship against the 53-strong Spanish fleet prompted Alfred Lord Tennyson to pen a poem, “The Revenge: A Ballad of the Fleet”.

Covering one entire wall is a painting of the caravela portuguesa, the small, fast sailing ships that, from the 15th century onwards, made Portugal the world’s first colonial power. Which gives me a holiday motto: steer clear of caravelas of either kind.

Sarah Provan is the FT’s acting deputy technology editor