Friday June 5, 2026
Hi All! We were docked in the port of Horta on the island of Faial in the Azores. The Azores is an archipelago of 9 different islands (all volcanic) and is part of Portugal. There are 15,000 people on this island and a total of 245,000 people across all 9 islands.
Right across the water from where we docked was the island of Pico. It has the tallest volcano in all of Portugal at 7,500 feet tall called Ponta do Pico. They say it goes miles below the water’s surface. It was cool to watch it throughout the day get cloud cover over both the top and bottom of it! And the one picture had a little “flying saucer” cloud on top!!
Well we were really hoping to go whale watching today but the sea Gods had other plans. We took a bus over to the whale watching company’s office for a very detailed briefing on all the whales and dolphins we’d see today. But then the call came in and they said the seas were way too rough to go out today. Oh well, safety first!
But that gave us time to walk around this pretty town before we did our afternoon tour of the entire island. We drove to an area called the Espalamaca that had a huge cross and statue of the Virgin Mary looking over the bay. It offered some awesome views over to Pico Island as well as the town of Horta and our ship!
We then drove to the viewpoint over the Caldera where the major volcano erupted back in 1957. It caused lots of damage and we saw all the black volcanic rocks and sand. It was even more visible when we drove to the old lighthouse at Capelinhos. There we also saw these amazing volcanic landscapes and rock formations right up against the pounding sea. Very cool!
We were back onboard about 4:30 and got ready for dinner. I’ll let the pictures do the talking. I’ll do an update later tonight.
The Wandering Italian 