Horta the Azores

Our second stop is the city of Horta on the island of Faial in the Azores. It is one of the nine inhabited Islands belonging to Portugal about 900 miles off the coast of Europe.

I booked a jeep tour with Tobago Azores for the afternoon. We see rugged coastlines, recent volcanic activity and lots of black and white cows. I hit an ATM for 40 euros. The local ATMs are free, but my credit union charges 1% for a foreign transaction fee plus $1.50 for the withdrawal. Within minutes, Mrs Phred has spent the euros on two umbrellas and a new purse, so I get another 40 euros from another ATM with the same results.

In the morning we have coffee in fort Santa Cruz, built in 1597 to protect from Spaniards. The fort now contains a pousada (heritage hotel) with a swimming pool surrounded by gun emplacements.  

In May, 1919, Captain Albert C. Read (U.S. Navy) completed the first Atlantic leg of the first transatlantic flight, when he piloted his Curtis NC-4 seaplane into the Bay of Horta..

There is a giant caldera in the center of Faial, unfortunately it was enshrouded in fog during our visit.

We did walk around the volcano museum which id underground near this abandoned lighthouse. The volcanic activity that began here in 1957 resulted in about half of the island's 30,000 inhabitants resettling to the U.S. and Canada.

Our room on the ship.

Horta in the Azores

The local museum boasts a large collection of scale models of buildings, ships, and people carved from fig kernels by Euclides Rosa.

Captain Albert Read completed the first Atlantic leg of the first transatlantic flight, via airplane, when he piloted his NC-4  into the Bay of Horta in May 1919.

The Azores were a major refueling stop for WWII transatlantic and then postwar flights until airplanes achieved longer ranges with the development of jet transports.

Horta is an Island in the Azores archipelago. If you were wondering, an archipelago, sometimes called an island group or island chain, is a cluster or collection of islands.

We tendered ashore on Palm Sunday so the carved fig kernel collection was unfortunately unavailable...maybe next time....