Five days in the Azores, mostly in fog

Everyone who has been to the Azores shows you the same photograph. Two lakes, one blue and one green, cupped inside a volcanic crater, impossibly bright under a clean sky. It is the reason I booked the flight. I want to say clearly, before we go any further: I did not see it.

Arriving in cloud

The plane dropped out of the grey into Ponta Delgada in early October, the runway wet and the hills behind it simply gone, rubbed out. I had booked the first night in a guesthouse near the harbour — only the first night, as is my habit now — and the owner, a cheerful man called Rui, greeted me with an umbrella and the words “It will clear.” He said this every morning for five days.

The town itself was lovely in the damp. Black-and-white pavements, churches outlined in dark basalt, hydrangeas everywhere, gone papery and blue at the end of the season. I ate grilled limpets with garlic butter in a tiny place on the waterfront and drank a glass of local white that tasted faintly of salt.

Sete Cidades, apparently

On the second day I took a bus up to Sete Cidades and walked to the viewpoint at Vista do Rei. I stood at the railing with about thirty other people, all of us staring into a wall of white. Occasionally the cloud would thin and someone would gasp, and we would all lean forward and see — a bit of a tree. Then it closed again.

A German couple next to me had come up three days in a row. The woman offered me a biscuit and said, very seriously, “We think it is a myth.” I took a photograph of the fog anyway. It’s one of my favourites from the trip: a grey rectangle with a railing in the corner and a single gull, which feels more honest than the postcard.

Down by the lake itself, in the village, the cloud lifted just enough to show still water and a church spire. I sat by the shore and ate a queijada from the café, and it was quiet in a way Lisbon never is.

Cozido from the ground

The thing I’ll actually remember is Furnas. The whole valley steams. There are fumaroles bubbling beside the road and the air smells, honestly, of eggs. Early each morning the restaurants lower big pots into holes dug in the hot volcanic earth by the lake, and leave them there for six or seven hours.

What comes out is cozido: beef, pork, chicken, blood sausage, chouriço, cabbage, potatoes, sweet potato and taro, all cooked by the ground itself until it collapses. I watched them dig the pots up at noon, a man in wellies hauling on a rope, steam pouring out like a magic trick. The plate cost €18, served enough for two, and I ate it alone and without shame.

Afterwards I sat in the iron-orange water of the Poça da Dona Beija springs while it drizzled on my head, which might be the most relaxed I have ever been.

On the last day I visited the tea fields at Gorreana, rows of green running down to the sea, and for exactly eleven minutes the sun came out. Rui was right, in the end. It cleared. Just not where I was looking.