Hello and welcome back! We’re continuing our short series on some recent travels my family and I took to the Azores islands and the Iberian Peninsula .

The next Azores island we visited on our vacation last month was Faial. Compared to São Miguel (the island which I wrote about last time), the island of Faial was a lot more mellow and laid back. It was quieter and less busy. Below are some photos and highlights.

The capital of Faial is Horta. It’s busy as a seaport, but not so much on the land. The Azores, being in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, are a logical stop for sailors cruising the world, and Horta is their port of choice. In the photo above is the church of Nossa Senhora das Angústias. We didn’t go inside of it, but were drawn to all of the decorative calçadas in front of it.

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Here you have the beach of Porto Pim, which had fairly clear water and gentle waves. Apparently, it’s one of the most popular beaches on the island, but hardly anyone was out enjoying it the day that we did. Perhaps it had something to do with the weather: it was sunny and then rainy and then back to sunny all in the same day (typical Azorean weather, we were told). Also included is a photo of the promenade along Porto Pim, and a photo of me sitting on the painted sea wall by the marina. Here’s what AzoresGetaways.com has to say about the sailor’s wall: “Nobody knows how the painting of the harbor walls first began. But one day, many years ago, the crew of a sailing vessel anchored in the harbor wanted to leave a souvenir of their visit to the island in the docks. This first painting was followed by others, gradually occupying the whole sea wall, which has been transformed into a brightly-colored mosaic of drawings evoking the many yachts that have stopped off in the marina.”

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Time for some photos of food. The photo on the left is a bit cluttered, sorry about that. We ordered a lot of food! I truly enjoyed the chouriço à bombeiro, which is a regional sausage flame-grilled on a traditional red clay pot called an assador de barro. The aroma of the roasting meat was amazing! Paired with a refreshing caipirinha, it was heaven! As for the photo on the right, we went to a restaurant where they brought out a heated lava stone and we cooked meat on it. A bit more work for us, but it was all very tasty. You can also see french fries in the photo. Not sure how they found their way to the islands, but almost every meal we had in the Azores included french fries. Likely it’s because potatoes are a staple of their diet.

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This last bit of Faial that I want to show you is Capelinhos. This was the sight of the year-long volcanic eruption of 1957 to 1958, which destroyed much of the lighthouse and added nearly a square mile (2.4 square kilometers) of new land to that area. On the right, you can see some of the new coastline jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. It was a unique experience to be standing and walking on land that was only 65 years old, that’s for sure! There’s now an information center under the lighthouse, where ground-level used to be. In it are such things as vintage newspaper clippings, old photographs and film footage of the area and of the eruption, precious stones which the volcano blasted out of the earth, as well as American football-shaped lava rocks called “lava bombs.” Here’s a short video with more information: https://youtu.be/nfMfGCxsyfg

That’s all for my post about Faial. Let me know in the comments if you have any questions or feedback. Be sure to come back again soon, as I will be showcasing the island of Pico.

As always, thanks for stopping by. ❤