TOPAZ-HUED lakes in the craters of dormant volcanoes; dark and stormy waterfalls, falling relentlessly; volcanic rock the colour of anthracite; 500-year-old vines drinking in the salty, Atlantic air—there’s a sense here that you’re miles away from all of it, which, in fact, you are.
The Azores is an autonomous region of Portugal, cast adrift in the North Atlantic and warmed by the surging Gulf Stream. The dramatic topography owes its existence to millennia of volcanic bursts and mighty underwater trembles carving, compressing and forcing the peaks of ocean-floor mountains up for breath. Once exposed, moss, cedar forests, hydrangea and ginger lilies