Porta Delgarda - Azores The last port before Southampton

Hi Guys,

Porta Delgarda Portugal – 11 April 2011

(Latitude: 38 30’North   Longitude: 28 00’ West)

(Time -1 GMT)

Average temperature 64F/18C

Our visit to the Azores is a welcome break after 5 days crossing the Atlantic from St. Lucia, unfortunately, the visit is only for the morning. We are sailing for Southampton at 12:30 this afternoon.

We have an excursion booked to visit Sete Cidades or Seven Cities, located in an extinct crater at the western end of the island. The cities are contained within the 8 mile circumference of this crater along with two lakes, one sometimes blue and one green dependent upon the sunlight and the algae. We drive through the delightful town of Porta Delgarda with some old buildings but mostly populated with buildings from the 60s. We wind up the road towards Sete Cidades stopping on several occasions for photo opportunities, but today there is a lot of cloud and the only thing to photograph at each stop are lots and lots of cows. I buy a tee shirt with 9 cows arranged in rows of 3, each cow is labeled with t

he name of one of the 9 islands that make up the 350 mile chain of the Azores.

We stop at a pineapple plantation in the suburb of Abeljeira where the pineapples are grown under glass. We are taken through the nearly two year cycle needed to grow pineapples and we sample the delicious local grown pineapple juice

Our next stop is the famous Antonio Borges Botanical Gardens. Planted in the mid-19th century, the Botanical Gardens are a peaceful haven with exotic trees, wooded groves and lush lawns. Large stands of bamboo and a pond of frogs croaking away

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Map of Crater Lake

Crater with Blue and Green Lakes

Pineapples in Azores

Street in Porta Delgards

The date of the discovery of the Azores remains somewhat uncertain, although Arabian geographers in the 12^th and 14^th centuries made mention of several islands in the Western Ocean other than the Canaries. The name Azores is derived from the Portuguese word for hawk or buzzard, Açor. as many of these birds were seen when the islands were discovered  Some think that the Azores could be the remnants of the fabled Atlantis?

The Azores or Western islands are a Portuguese archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean are volcanic in origin and shaped into their present form by the collision of the American and African plates. They consist of 9 islands divided into three groups. They are on approximately the same latitude as Lisbon and Washington DC and about 760 miles west of Portugal

Porta Delgarda is on the island of San Miguel and is about 35 x 9 miles with a population of about 240,000. The vegetation is remarkably beautiful and varied, and practically anything which grows in temperate or subtropical zones will flourish, there is the possibility of getting three to four crops from the land each year.

Dairy products and beef on the hoof are the most important exports and the growing and export of pineapples. Other exports include beet-sugar, alcohol, tea, tobacco, cereals and tinned fish. There are many hot springs of great interest with spas and many springs of mineral medicinal waters, some of them being tapped commercially

Well, I must bid you a fond farewell as our next port of call will be Southampton on the 14^th April. It’s been a great Grand Voyage and thank you all for your comments and emails, glad so many of you have enjoyed the voyage along with us, in fact the stats show us that the blog has been visited 1500 times in the last 4 months  - - - - - - - Wow.

 Now, when get home I will work on my garden before we attend the Royal Wedding and our niece’s wedding early May. In June we fly off to New York before our trip back to South Africa in the fall.

Hope you have enjoyed this blog, as Susan and I celebrated the year of our 50^th Wedding Anniversary.

Roy and Susan