Azores
in Portugal

Nine volcanic islands in the middle of the Atlantic, each one different enough from the last to justify the inter-island flights. São Miguel is the most visited and earns it: the Sete Cidades caldera lake sitting in its extinct crater in two shades of green and blue, the Furnas valley with its bubbling thermal pools and the cozido slow-cooked underground in volcanic heat, the whale watching offshore that operates year-round because this stretch of ocean is genuinely one of the best on earth. Faial and Pico face each other across a channel with the mid-Atlantic ridge running between them, and the black lava vineyards of Pico, where Verdelho grows in stone-walled curraletas against the wind, are unlike any landscape viticulture produces anywhere else. The Azores reward those who stay long enough to understand that the weather is part of the character, not a problem to be solved.