My bones rattle like a bag of quarters left on a spinning dryer as I roll down a steep dirt hill, the mountain bike’s back-wheel skidding across wet, loose gravel at each touch of the brake. Visibility is limited by the fact that I am, it would appear, in a cloud, a thousand feet above sea level. The slope shows no sign of leveling off; teeth clenched, eyes wide, I careen past two Holstein cows who turn lazily my way, unperturbed by my approach or their perch on what looks like the edge of the world. When the cloud moves and the sky clears—and this happens quickly—I see two lakes (one Caribbean-blue, the other emerald-green) and a tiny white-washed village at the bottom of a volcanic crater so green it practically glows. It’s hard to focus on not flying off my bike with a view like this. I drop it and look out over the lakes. Clouds gather and clear again, in cycles that last around 15 minutes each. I’m completely alone.
This is Sete Cidades, a massive dormant volcano in western São Miguel, the largest island of the Azores archipelago. A set of nine volcanic islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, the Azores was first settled by the Portuguese in the 15th century, but they feel much farther from the European mainland than their 890 miles to Lisbon. I'm here to shed my city skin, the one that's comfortable squeezing into subway cars and eating dinner standing up; to get outside, try some things I’ve never done before. Maybe get a little scared.
Mountain biking around a crater is a good start. The dirt path drops, and rather than give in to that "This is how I die" feeling, I let my mind drift to the legend learned that morning from a local at a coffee shop about Sete Cidades’ twin lakes: It’s a story of a forbidden love between a princess and a shepherd, and of the eventual heartbreak and lake-forming tears—one set green, for that was the color of the princess’s eyes, and the other blue, as they flowed from the shepherd’s. Rounding a sharp corner, I begin to ease off the brake from time to time and let my speed pick up. This is the kind of place where it feels like such a myth could be real; so much on this island defies reality.
I pass a pair of hikers, the only people I see on this excursion besides my guide, Maria Inês Pavão, a marine biologist who works with the tour company Futurismo, and who is very patiently (and graciously) waiting in a jeep at certain checkpoints to make sure I haven't broken anything along the way. The two elderly trekkers smile at me, but I can see concern flash in their eyes as I momentarily lose my balance while trying to execute a very cool, very nonchalant wave. By the time I get off the dirt and onto the main road to the village of Sete Cidades, an empty two-lane affair that winds its way down toward the water, it’s raining. I pull my now-cramping, still white-knuckled fingers completely off the brakes and coast.
São Miguel is a veritable outdoor playground. The 290-square-mile island is the most developed of the Azores, but still, especially deep into the low season of November, it feels wild. There were no fences to stop me from flying head-over-wheel into the volcanic lakes on one side of my bike path or toward the angry Atlantic on the other. Elsewhere, waterfalls run into other waterfalls. Waves crash against black-sand beaches. Feasts are cooked in cauldrons lowered into deep volcanic vents, and the surrounding ocean is home to 27 species of whales, porpoises, and dolphins, the latter of which you can swim with in conservationist-led snorkeling excursions.
My five-day itinerary, booked less than a week in advance with Azores Getaways, an online travel agency that offers deeply discounted flight-accommodation-activity deals, takes me on two wheels around the Sete Cidades crater; onto tea plantations, first sown in the 19th century when some enterprising Azoreans brought over a Chinese tea grower for training; and into mineral-rich hot springs and the Atlantic, which hovers between 63 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit year-round because of warm ocean currents. All the while, I’m left with one recurring thought: Where the hell are all the tourists?
How is it that I could pull my rental car over into one of many miradouros, or look-out points, and have these views all to myself? A crater crowded with thick vegetation; a string of cliffs reaching into the sea, one after another to the horizon like they're caught in a hall of mirrors; rolling hills dotted with cattle—and not a selfie stick in sight.
Again and again, I was told that the high season, when mainland Europeans flock to these islands in July and August, is a different story: Tour buses are more common—somehow, impossibly, navigating the island’s tiny, winding roads—and the trendiest restaurants in Ponta Delgada, the island’s capital, require reservations. But it wasn’t just the lack of crowds that surprised me—this didn’t seem like an island built with tourists in mind. Hotels, for the most part, are small, modest, and confined to the major towns. Entire stretches of coastline—land any developer would look at with euro signs in their eyes—remain untouched, save for the occasional barn or geothermal plant (around 50 percent of energy on the island is renewable).
The numbers and news do tell a different story though—if not one of mass tourism, one of an alarmingly fast growth toward it. The number of overnight American visitors to the islands between January and September this year was up 28.8 percent compared to last year. In 2016, the Azores were the fastest-growing region for tourists in Portugal. Even as the federal and local governments take pains to make sure the tourist sector remains sustainable—by limiting major resort development and promoting eco-tourism—other external forces are setting up conditions for rapid change.
Americans typically have to fly Azores Airlines from hubs of the Azorean diaspora like Boston and Oakland to get to the islands, but in May, Delta will start flying to Ponta Delgada from New York-JFK five days a week. The Azores archipelago has been touted as the “next Iceland,” and not just for the natural beauty or promise of adventure; it’s also geographically positioned to be a highly appealing European stopover, a less-than-five-hour direct flight from the east coast of the U.S. Now, I recognize that as an outsider looking for a new connection with Mother Nature, I have no right to be worried about Ponta Delgada going the way of Reykjavík, which has more Americans than Icelanders during high season, especially when many Azoreans depend on tourism for their livelihoods. But it’s not long before I see that the locals, too, have noticed the warning signs.
Luís Nunes, the tech-whizz founder of Azores Getaways, grew up in Rabo de Peixe, a fishing community on São Miguel’s northern coast. He’s behind the wheel of his deceptively zippy Peugeot sedan as we wind across the island toward Ponta da Ferraria, a natural hot spring that flows right into the Atlantic Ocean. He presses an ominous button reading “SPORT” near the gearbox, and shoots off down a rare straight stretch of road. I ask him what’s stopping the Azores—once home to whalers, fishermen, cattle farmers, pineapple growers—from being totally overrun by tourists and he’s fairly confident these islands will always have a wild side, untouched by tour bus convoys or resort complexes.
“Our guarantee to tourists is that you’re coming to a place that’s not crowded, that respects nature, that respects the local traditions, and shows you something different,” Nunes tells me. It’s a guarantee he’s comfortable making because, unlike some other island destinations, including Portuguese ones like Madeira, travelers won’t find many opportunities to lounge on the beach with a cocktail. It’s the Azores’ wildness—the unpredictable weather, the quick-to-anger ocean—that could save it. “In Madeira, they’re building a 600-room hotel,” Nunes says, as we overtake a horse-drawn buggy. “It’s 80 million euros in investment, which is all the hotels in the Azores combined.” Without the white-sand beaches (volcanic black sand rules here), the Azores need to appeal to tourists in a different way—like having an entire mountain biking trail to yourself. “I want to protect it because I just love the Azores, but I’m also a practical guy and I know that the best way to get the protection is showing people that this is good for your wallet, too,” he says.
That exclusivity, driven not by astronomical prices, but rather the ruggedness of these islands as a destination, is on full display when, mountain biking checked off, I try another activity that gets my blood pumping before I've even begun. This one starts with wetsuits, followed by a belt weighed down by heavy-duty carabiners, and topped with a helmet, placed snugly over my skull. In a group of six—two guides carrying reams of rope and waterproof backpacks, and four mere mortals, including myself—we hike down a densely forested river canyon. Occasionally we go knee-deep in water; at other times, we have to scramble over boulders and duck under fallen trees, dislodged by recent mudslides. But this amphibious hiking isn’t the main attraction. This is canyoning and here is precipice number one—a sudden and sheer rock drop, 15 feet onto another path below that we will rappel onto. A few sentences of directions, and I’m off, bounding gracefully down the flat, vertical stone, like I’m some sort of woodland ninja superhero… Well, not quite. Canyoning is hard.
I don’t lean back far enough and momentum carries me knee-first into rock—I slide the rest of the way down. On a makeshift zipline down another drop, the rope isn’t slack enough, so I get suspended in mid-air. One of the guides—the air-guitar-playing, perpetually-grinning Bruno—has to grab me by the ankle and pull me the rest of the way. The final two drops are the twin waterfalls of Salto do Cabrito, so I’m not just rappelling, but I’m doing so while water gushes in my face—after the first few seconds, shuffling down the slick rock, it’s hopeless. I flail and kick, occasionally letting go of rope so I'll eventually be on solid ground and out of the waterfall. When I reach the bottom of the second waterfall, Bruno gives me a very generous high-five of encouragement and points at a small pocket of lake about ten feet down. Here’s something I can do: I jump.
Do I have a future in canyoning? The bruises and pain in muscles I didn’t know I had point to a definitive “no.” Would I recommend any visitor to São Miguel book such an excursion with Azorean Active Blueberry? Hell yes. This is an island that rewards you when you challenge yourself.
The only time Bruno, last name Silva, stops joking is for a few fleeting minutes as we drive back to the Azor Hotel, a modern, perfectly located spot in Ponta Delgada, when I ask him about how he sees his beloved island changing. “Can you imagine all of this full of hotels and giant resorts? I cannot imagine it,” he says as we pass the wide open coastal plains and windswept beaches outside the town of Ribeira Grande. “I’ve surfed on this beach for almost 30 years, and it has changed a lot, but it’s still manageable. If they do that, they’re going to destroy it.” Still, like Nunes, he has hopes that tourists will provide the feedback loop that will keep things low-rise and wild. “The good thing is that maybe 90 percent of our customers realize that—they see how important it is to protect the nature. They want to keep it like it is.”
I hear similar sentiments, too, from Maria Inês Pavão, the marine biologist who brought me and a mountain bike up to the crater of Sete Cidades. This time, Pavão is taking a break from the swells of the Atlantic, where she spends much of her time on whale-watching expeditions, to join me for a day in Furnas, a very active volcanic complex in the island's eastern reaches. We start the day at the Terra Nostra Hotel, where we've been given access to the kitchen to watch a local speciality, cozido das Furnas, being made: In the early morning, the array of meats—pig ear, beef shank, chicken thigh, blood sausage—and root vegetables are chopped and assembled; then the carefully layered cauldron is lowered into volcanic vents in the ground; in the afternoon, it's removed and served in ungodly portions. Pavão tells me that despite having spent some time on the Portuguese mainland, she keeps coming back. She’s not alone here in having that magnetic draw to the land. In her estimation, it’s that intangible bond that will prevent São Miguel and its eight sister islands from become overcrowded, even as more travelers arrive every year.
“I hope tourism will keep increasing; it’s an opportunity for many people, but we need to find the balance,” she tells me as we each attempt to conquer a plate of meat that could feed an entire soccer team. “We live well here. It’s safe, it’s beautiful. If you enjoy nature, you can do everything in a day: You can be in the sea, in a hot spring, on a volcano. The biodiversity isn’t huge, but what we have is so special.”
Luís Nunes puts it another way. “One of my dreams is actually making enough money to buy a lot of land somewhere here just so that no one will build there,” he says on my last day on São Miguel, over freshly caught tuna sashimi and mineral-rich white wine from the island of Pico. “It’d be my land, but it’s just trees. No one can touch it.” After just five days, it’s a dream I can get behind.
