Shearwaters screeched over onyx-black sea cliffs that soared triumphantly out of the surging white surf. At the same time, the wind whipped loose cinders off a grey hump ribbed with sharp ridges. From the top of the Capelinhos lighthouse, I gazed over Faial island’s wild west, reminding myself of a preposterous fact: this whole headland was barely older than I was.
The lighthouse is now a museum showing photos and film footage from 1957, a time when colossal fountains of steam and mud burst out of the ocean in a chain of booming explosions. Mushroom clouds of black ash billowed into the atmosphere, and over the following months a new island, 100 metres high, rose out of the waves. Lava flows then formed an isthmus, bolting the new bluff to Faial.
As I repeatedly discovered in the Azores, geography and geology are not ancient history here; they happen before your eyes. These nine (to date) volcanic lumps, a third of the way between Lisbon and New York, were squeezed from the Atlantic floor as a result of their location at the junction of three continental plates – the Eurasian, African and North American. But it’s an ongoing process. Eruptions, rumbles and shakes are commonplace, so I came prepared for a bit of tectonic edginess. What I discovered instead was a wealth of wildlife, tradition and myth all tied up with the islands’ sense of fiery impermanence.
ASH IN THE BLOOD
My opinion of Faial was certainly more favourable than that of the 19th-century author Mark Twain. He landed there in 1867 aboard the steamship Quaker City on the first leg of a European journey that would later become part of his travel classic The Innocents Abroad. The author declared the locals to be little better ‘than the donkeys they eat and sleep with’, sparing only its towns (‘miracles of cleanliness’) his wrath before sulking off to Gibraltar.
Twain’s ship had initially been bound for Sao Miguel until a storm forced him to dock at its smaller cousin. I had better luck, and my first impressions upon
