🌋 Azores: volcanoes, legends and history

Anyone who follows the weather forecast knows the Azores, even if they have never been there. The Azores High is a huge area of high pressure over the Atlantic that decides which way rainy fronts travel towards Europe. When it spreads out, Portugal and Spain get less rain. The islands beneath it, though, are more interesting than any depression.

The nine islands lie in the middle of the ocean, about 1,400 kilometres from Portugal. They fall into three groups: the eastern group with São Miguel and Santa Maria, the central group with Terceira, Graciosa, São Jorge, Pico and Faial, and the western group with Flores and Corvo.

Islands on the seam of three continents

Beneath the Azores, three tectonic plates meet: the North American, the Eurasian and the African. Along the floor of the Atlantic, from north to south, runs the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, where the plates move apart and magma rises from the Earth's interior. The ridge passes right through the archipelago. Flores and Corvo therefore sit on the North American plate, while the other seven islands are on the side of Europe and Africa. Between the Eurasian and African plates runs another, very slow rift, known as the Terceira Rift.

Where the crust tears, magma rises. After millions of years of outpourings on the ocean floor, volcanoes grew so tall that their summits broke the surface. Every Azorean island is just the tip of a giant mountain, most of which stays under water. Geologists still argue about whether a hot mantle plume also rises beneath the archipelago, like the ones under Iceland or Hawaii, or whether the tearing of the plates alone explains everything.

The islands did not form all at once. The oldest is Santa Maria, whose oldest rocks above sea level are more than eight million years old. It is the only one with sedimentary rocks at the surface too – limestones and sandstones full of fossil shells, sea urchins and shark teeth. During its long history the island sank beneath the sea and rose again.

The youngest is Pico, only about three hundred thousand years old. On the island stands Mount Pico, 2,351 metres high, the highest peak in all of Portugal. It last erupted in December 1720. On its black lava fields, vines are grown in hundreds of small enclosures of dry-stone walls that shelter them from the wind – the Pico vineyard landscape has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004.

The volcanoes here are not a thing of the past. In September 1957 the Capelinhos submarine eruption began off the coast of Faial. It lasted thirteen months, and new land of about two and a half square kilometres rose from the sea and joined the island. The most recent eruption in the region came between 1998 and 2001 off Terceira, hundreds of metres under water – and for months floating blocks of hot lava, hollow inside like balloons, kept appearing on the sea.

Legends of islands that were here before

Such an extraordinary place was bound to attract legends. The most famous is Atlantis. In 1882 the American politician Ignatius Donnelly wrote a book claiming that the Azores are the mountaintops of the sunken island continent Plato wrote about. The book sold brilliantly and the idea lives on. But it is only a legend: geology shows that the Azores are not the remains of a sunken landmass but young volcanoes that, on the contrary, grew up out of the ocean.

A second legend tells of seven bishops. When the Moors invaded the Iberian Peninsula in 711, seven bishops supposedly fled west across the ocean with their faithful, founded seven cities on an island and burned their ships so that no one could go back. The Island of the Seven Cities was then drawn on maps for centuries, even though nobody ever found it. A crater on São Miguel still bears the name Sete Cidades, Seven Cities – but no seven cities ever stood there.

The third is the most mysterious. In the sixteenth century the chronicler Damião de Góis wrote that the first navigators found on the island of Corvo a stone statue of a horseman, stretching out his arm and pointing west, towards America. The pedestal was said to bear inscriptions in an unknown script. But the statue has not survived, and nothing proves it ever existed. Most likely it was a rock formation that resembled a rider, or just a tall tale. On Corvo it is still part of local folklore.

Hawks that were buzzards

The real discovery is less mysterious. The islands of Santa Maria and São Miguel were recorded around 1427 by the Portuguese navigator Diogo de Silves, and settlement began in the 1430s. The westernmost islands, Flores and Corvo, were not discovered until 1452, by Diogo de Teive. The settlers came mainly from southern Portugal, but also from Flanders and northern France.

Nobody knows for certain where the name comes from. The best-known explanation says that navigators saw birds of prey circling over the islands and took them for goshawks, *açor* in Portuguese. But goshawks don't live here. As early as the sixteenth century the chronicler Gaspar Frutuoso pointed out that the birds over the islands are actually local buzzards. Other historians therefore derive the name from the Italian *azzurro*, blue, after the so-called Blue Islands on old maps.

When cows defeated an army

In 1580 the Portuguese crown passed to King Philip II of Spain. The island of Terceira refused to recognise him and stood by a rival claimant. In July 1581 a Spanish force landed in the bay of Salga – and, according to contemporary accounts, the defenders drove hundreds of wild cattle against it. The stampeding cows and bulls charged in among the soldiers and helped defeat the attackers. Terceira finally surrendered only two years later, but the bulls made it into the Azorean coat of arms.

Whales, a volcano and America

For centuries the Azoreans lived from the sea. Lookouts sat on the cliffs watching for sperm whales, and the men rowed out after them in open boats with hand harpoons. The last sperm whale was caught here in 1987. Today people go out to the whales only with a camera.

The Capelinhos eruption also had an unexpected effect across the ocean. Many families on Faial lost their homes and fields, so in 1958 the US Congress passed a special law allowing affected Azoreans to move to the United States. One of its co-sponsors was a young senator, John F. Kennedy. The law set off a large wave of emigration, and the Azorean communities in Massachusetts and California are still strong today.

The Azores today

Since 1976 the Azores have been an autonomous region of Portugal with their own parliament and government. They have three capitals: the government sits in Ponta Delgada on São Miguel, the parliament in Horta on Faial, and the courts and the bishop in Angra do Heroísmo on Terceira, whose historic centre has been on the UNESCO list since 1983. The 2021 census counted just under 237,000 inhabitants.

And one more thing that surprises everyone who comes here in summer. The blue and pink hydrangeas that line the roads and pastures and have become a symbol of the islands are not Azorean. They were brought here from Japan as an ornamental plant and liked it so much that they spread into the wild and now crowd out native plants. That, too, is the Azores: a place where even the most typical thing may have come from the other side of the world.