From the village of Ribeirinha, tucked away beside a stream in a fold in the land, the road crosses a narrow bridge before heading up into the forest. Tarmac soon gives way to volcanic gravel, rutted and strewn with the debris of recent storms. At the crest of the hill the track emerges from the trees and the view opens out: the last fields of Faial island, a patchwork of deep green divided by black stone walls and dotted with cows. Beyond the headland, white crests on distant waves break the surface of the Atlantic between Faial and neighbouring islands. São Jorge is away to the north-east, and Pico is just visible in the clouds off to the east. At the centre of the scene is a dramatic ruin, the fractured shell of a lighthouse — the Farol da Ribeirinha.
Apart from a farmer forking hay from the back of his tractor and his collection of cows, we have the headland with its ruined lighthouse all to ourselves. The Farol da Ribeirinha is hollowed out and patched up, with fragile-looking walls that attest to earthquake damage. The lighthouse has that haunting beauty of abandoned buildings the world over, but it speaks to the specific story of these islands — in particular the tectonic circumstances which created the Azores archipelago and have shaped life here since the first settlers arrived in the fifteenth century.
The former lighthouse at Ponta da Ribeirinha on Faial Island in the Azorean archipelago (photo © Katrin Schönig).
It was July 1998, almost eighty years after the light house was commissioned, that the earthquake struck. The epicentre was just a few miles offshore. Along with the lighthouse, the church in Ri beirinha was damaged beyond repair, and many other churches, houses and farm buildings across the north of Faial were destroyed. Ten people died and a hundred were injured, with nearly 3,000 left homeless. Across the island as a whole, a third of all buildings suffered some kind of damage.
Loss and resilience
The legacy remains. We follow the road from Ribeirinha across the north of Faial, wending our way through Salão to Cedros and beyond. In each village, the effects of the earthquake are still evident. There are ruins a plenty, but evidence too of the massive rebuilding job that followed the earth quake. All the bridges crossing myriad streams running north from the island’s mountainous interior down to the coast are marked with their date of construction: 1999.
The brand-new churches built out of reinforced concrete with modern earthquake-proofing techniques look like they’re from some 20th-century American suburb or British New Town. And among the village houses, with shiny tile roofs and colourful paint jobs, there are numerous crumbling buildings slowly being swallowed by bushes, brambles and tall grass. Some of these ruins stand at the bottom of fields still being used for pasture. Others are on the main road, in the heart of the village, their faded signs suggesting a previous life as a butcher’s shop or a bakery.
The Azores were born as volcanoes and have been shaped by eruptions and earthquakes since the islands emerged from the ocean approximately eight million years ago.
But while there is every chance these buildings have been abandoned since the 1998 earthquake, that’s not infallibly the case. These islands, settled by people from Portugal and elsewhere, have long been a place of departure as well as arrival. Emigration is part of every Azorean family story, and it shapes life, language and culture. Over the centuries, people have left the Azores for many reasons, from convulsions in the earth to convulsions of the economic system, from earthquakes to crop-destroying diseases, or the simple promise of a better life on either side of the ocean.
On the islands, houses that were once homes tell a tale of those who have left. In the Azorean poet Pedro da Silveira’s collection Poems in Absentia, written in 1999 near the end of his life, he describes an island scene in his poem ‘An Elegy, Nearly.’ The poem recalls a languid, hot afternoon, filled with memories drifting in on the warm breeze. The poet remembers a farewell, a moment of leaving many years before, and he addresses his poem to the person who was leaving then, stepping out from “the house where now no one lives.”
Tantas casas desertas, he writes in the final lines. “So many deserted houses / and so many faces never to be found.”
The lure of distant lands
The Azores were born as volcanoes and have been shaped by eruptions and earthquakes since the islands emerged from the ocean approximately eight million years ago. These islands, of which nine are inhabited, sit at a triple junction of the North American Plate, the Eurasian Plate and the African Plate, and since those first settlers arrived some five centuries ago, there have been 28 significant volcanic eruptions and frequent earthquakes. Seismic events are registered daily.
Our route across the north of the island takes us to the far west of Faial, where the eruption of the Capelinhos volcano that started in 1957 and would last for nine months created a whole new headland, adding 2.4 square kilometres to the island’s total size while covering more than a quarter of Faial in volcanic ash. The story is told in an underground exhibition beneath another abandoned building — this one the lighthouse near Ponta dos Capelinhos at the north-western tip of Faial. The lighthouse now stands lonely and ash-stained, surrounded by a haunting, otherworldly landscape that the eruption left behind.
Walking across the moon-like expanse of volcanic ash and rock that falls away from the lighthouse to the sea, it is hard to imagine what was here before. Among the few shrubs that have taken root amid the desolation, a single white house is all that remains of the whaling station that was the largest and most productive on all of the Azores. Until the 1957 eruption, four hundred whalers and their families lived here during the season, their ships protected by natural harbours created by earlier lava flows. When the volcano erupted, their way of life abruptly ended.
“With the end of the eruption,” we read on an information board beside the whalers’ boat house, “the American borders opened to the people that had lost everything, and many young whalers followed the course of emigration, keeping in their memory the golden but difficult times of whale hunting.”
The Azorean Refugee Act was co-sponsored by Massachusetts senator John F. Kennedy, and granted visas to more than 1,500 islanders, many of whom travelled to New England where there was an already established Azorean community. Over the next forty years, with another big wave after the 1998 volcanic eruption, some 175,000 Azoreans moved to the United States alone, while others went to Canada or Portugal. The island of Faial lost nearly a third of its population, and it is estimated that there are more than a million people in the Azorean diaspora, four times the total population of the islands today.
Azorean emigrés can be found in Brazil, where they first arrived after a volcanic eruption in the 17th century, bringing with them a devotion to the Cult of the Holy Spirit that remains strong in the Azores and in parts of Brazil to this day. They joined New England whaling ships in the 18th and 19th centuries, settling down to life in the textile mill communities in Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Some Azoreans took part in the California Gold Rush, and helped establish the dairy industry out west, to the extent that by the 1950s much of Californian milk and cheese production was in the hands of migrants from the Azores. The movement was never just one way. People left the islands and people returned.
Over the centuries, this flux created the Azorean culture that can be experienced today, shaped by Portugal but also Brazil, New England and Africa. The archipelago was a safe haven for anyone crossing the North Atlantic, and its strategic location midway between Europe and the Americas gave the island of Faial a nodal position in the development of telegraphy with the island’s capital at Horta boasting a fine range of cable connections.
Ties with the wider world
Almost everyone we meet on the Azores, as we travel from São Miguel to São Jorge, to Faial and back to São Miguel again has some family connection to the United States or Canada. In São Miguel we meet a guide called Leandro, who is part of the burgeoning adventure tourism scene on the islands and who spends his day taking visitors on kayak tours, mountain bike trips or canyoning adventures.
“What you have to understand,“ Leandro says, “is that our communities were incredibly insular for a long, long time.” For centuries there was little by way of regular transport links between the islands, and even within a single island people did not move between the villages or regions.”
Leandro grew up in the northeast of São Miguel, where — in his grandparents’ lifetime — it would take a whole day to travel to the island’s major town of Ponta Delgada, a journey that now takes about fifty minutes along a fast road.
“Indeed,” he says, “people where I am from, say eighty years ago, would have had better knowledge of New Bedford or Fall River — both communities in New England with lots of Azorean exiles — than the other side of São Miguel. It was your village or the other side of the ocean. Those were the options. You either made it work at home, or you left. Even if it is a bit different today, it still holds true for a lot of people. You leave your village and you go to Lisbon, or to Porto, or the States. It wouldn’t occur to most to make a move within the Azores.”
Those who left would continue to have an influence on life back home. “A lot of those who left the islands made regular visits back,” Leandro continues. “They were homesick, maybe. And this had a clear effect on the way we speak. In reality, our language should not be considered Portuguese, but a dialect of it. A lot of our words are English in origin. We call chewing gum gama instead of pastilha elástica, and we call a mop a mapa instead of esfregona.”
Bookshop in Ponta Delgada, Azores, with distinctive tilework on the upper facade (photo © Katrin Schönig).
In a Ponta Delgada bookshop, I pick up a copy of the novel Smiling in the Darkness by the Azorean writer Adelaide Freitas. It is set in a small village in the isolated east of São Miguel in the 1950s, not far from where Leandro grew up half a century later. It tells the story of a family divided by the ocean, of parents who leave their children behind with their grandmother while they try and earn the money for a better life for all of them.
“To leave was the destiny of our people,” the narrator tells us, while photographs at home remind those who remain of what their loved ones look like, while on the other side of the ocean, the music and the language helps those who have gone maintain their connection with the islands they have left behind.
Music from the heart
In the lounge of our hotel, along with a piano and a collection of books in a multitude of languages, there is an interesting musical instrument. It is a small guitar, with a series of double strings, not unlike a mandolin. Instead of a single sound hole, like on a classical guitar, it has two small ones shaped like hearts, leaning into each other below the fretboards. They do not quite touch.
Saudade is a Portuguese word that has no exact English equivalent, but has long been an emotion or a state of mind that is central to Portuguese culture. It is a state of longing for something — or someone — that is absent.
In the Azores, these are said to represent the hearts that belong to every person. The one that you take with you when you leave, and the one that stays behind. This Azorean instrument is called a viola da terra — a ‘guitar of the land’ — and like many traditional instruments its usage fell away over the decades to the point that, until fairly recently, there was only one guitar maker on the islands who was still producing them.
Thankfully a new generation of musicians such as Rafael Carvalho from São Miguel have created a renewed interest in the instrument and all it represents — with those two hearts at the very centre. I try to arrange a meeting with Carvalho but he is off the island. With apologies, he sends me a link to his music including a Youtube video of him sitting in an island church playing a traditional tune that he describes as a ‘Saudade’.
Saudade is a Portuguese word that has no exact English equivalent, but has long been an emotion or a state of mind that is central to Portuguese culture. It is a state of longing for something — or someone — that is absent. There is a debate around the origins of the term, with some scholars linking it to Portugal’s ‘era of discovery’. But what seems beyond doubt is that Saudade has maintained its hold on the culture because of the generations of people leaving Portugal’s shores, and that yearning bred by separation. It feels like everywhere we go in the Azores, this emotion is present in the stories we hear and the experiences of the people we meet. The story of the Azores is the story of emigration. Of departure and, if you are lucky, of a return on your own terms.
Leaving and returning
In 1999, the Portuguese postal service commissioned a stamp of the 1926 painting ‘Os Emigrantes’ by Azorean artist Domingos Rebelo. Rebelo was born in Ponta Delgada and left at the age of 15 to study art in Paris. He returned to São Miguel for a while, before moving to Lisbon where he lived until his death. But although he spent much of his life away from the islands, he always returned to the Azores, both in real life and in his art, which often portrays everyday, rural life on the islands.
It says something about these islands that his most famous work should be a painting that dwells on the moment of departure. ‘Os Emigrantes’ depicts people waiting at Ponta Delgada harbour. They are wearing traditional clothes, with their belongings piled high on the quayside. It is that quiet time just before the final moment of farewell. Alongside their trunks they have with them a framed image depicting Senhor Santo Cristo dos Milagres (Lord Holy Christ of the Miracles) and a guitar with those two distinctive heart-shaped holes that will always remind the migrants of the place and the people they have left behind.
In the town of Lagoa, just along the coast from Ponta Delgada, João and his father work the vines of a small vineyard they have planted on a hillside at the edge of town. João is home for the holidays. He is studying electrical engineering in Lisbon. There is a university in Ponta Delgada but, like many young people from the Azores, the best option for João to complete his education was to leave. But will he come back?
“You can earn more money in Portugal, for sure,” João says, as his father pours us a glass of moonshine at eleven in the morning. “But I think I will return, after my studies.”
His father looks at his glass and smiles.
“More money, but…”
João’s father does not quite have the vocabulary to complete his thought, but we all know what he is getting at. You leave because you have to. If there is a chance to return home, to make it work on these islands, on your island, then money is no longer the most important thing.
We smile at each other and, in the dusty confines of the shed of João’s father in the late morning of a winter’s day, we drink an unspoken toast to the places that mean more to us than money, and to the day we’ll return.
