Faial Natural Park

The Capelinhos eruption of 1957–58 added two square kilometres of new land to Faial's western tip. It also helped empty the island: roughly half the affected population emigrated to New England under a special US visa programme, which makes the eruption the founding event of much of the Azorean diaspora in the United States. The island it reshaped sits in the central group of the Azores, about twenty-one kilometres long and fourteen wide, with the town of Horta on its southern coast and the wide green Caldeira at its centre.

Horta's marina is the central fact of the island's external life. Since the 1960s it has been a mandatory stopover for any sailboat crossing the North Atlantic; the harbour walls are covered, by tradition, with painted murals left by the crews of yachts that pass through. The marina opens onto Peter Café Sport, a bar founded in 1918 that has functioned, for three generations of the Azevedo family, as the unofficial post office, weather service and social club of the trans-Atlantic sailing world.

Faial Natural Park covers most of the island that is not town: the Caldeira, the Capelinhos lighthouse and volcano interpretation centre, the coastal cliffs of Varadouro, the laurel forest at Cabeço dos Trinta. The island is small enough to walk across in two days, and empty enough that you can do so meeting almost no one. The hydrangea hedges, planted as field boundaries in the nineteenth century, turn the interior road network briefly and improbably blue every July.

April and May are the safest bet, warm enough for walking and dry enough for the Caldeira rim, with the trails close to empty. June into July brings the hydrangeas into bloom, and the Sea Week (Semana do Mar) sailing festival in early August is the year's busiest fortnight. September and October walk well too, and are the best months for whale-watching from Horta as the migratory species pass. Winter is mild but Atlantic. Rain comes often and the wind means it; several smaller restaurants close in February. "Summer" in the Azores does not mean reliably hot: the average August day in Horta is around 24°C and the sea around 22°C, which suits walking and snorkelling better than serious beach use.

Faial has its own airport (Horta) with daily SATA Azores Airlines flights from Lisbon (around 2 hours 40 minutes) and short-hop connections from São Miguel and Terceira. From Pico, the neighbouring island, the Atlanticoline ferry crosses the channel in thirty minutes, several times a day in summer and a handful of times in winter; many visitors fly into Pico's airport and ferry across. There are no train services in the Azores. On Faial itself, the public bus (Farias) loops the island in either direction from Horta several times a day, though service thins out on Sundays and outside the summer timetable. Taxis are inexpensive but few in number. The island is walkable and bikeable end-to-end if you have a long weekend.

Horta is the only practical base. The town is compact and walkable, oriented to the marina; staying anywhere else on the island means losing the social life of the harbour. Pousada de Forte de Santa Cruz occupies a sixteenth-century fortress on the seafront and is the pick if the budget allows (check rates with the Pousadas group). The Faial Resort Hotel is a larger, more conventional option above the marina. Quinta das Buganvílias and Casa do Mar are small family-run B&Bs with strong reputations (confirm it still operates). On the Capelinhos side, villages such as Praia do Norte and Cedros have rural-tourism farmhouses that suit a longer stay focused on walking. Reserve early for Sea Week and for July. In April, May, September and October the island has rooms to spare.

Azorean food is plainer than mainland Portuguese cooking and built around what the islands produce: beef from cattle that graze the Caldeira rim, cheese from São Jorge across the channel, tuna and bonito caught the same morning, pineapple from greenhouses on São Miguel, and the local Pico wine, a mineral white grown on volcanic stone walls visible from the Faial coast. The dish to ask for is alcatra, beef slow-braised in red wine with onions and bacon in a clay pot. Cozido das Furnas, the volcanic-steam stew, is a São Miguel speciality but appears in better Horta restaurants. Peter Café Sport is the institution for a drink; Genuíno is the place to eat fish caught by the owner the same day. For pastry, look for the queijadas da Vila Franca and the local fennel cakes.

Start with the Caldeira. The rim trail runs just under seven kilometres around the central crater, looking down into a forested floor that has been a strict nature reserve since the 1970s; the park signs the loop as PRC04FAI, reckons about two and a half hours for it, and routes you through a short tunnel to a viewing point inside the rim, with Cabeço Gordo at 1,043 metres as the high point. Then head west to the Capelinhos lighthouse and interpretation centre, half-buried in the 1957 ash and now an excellent volcano museum. Give Horta a morning of its own. The Museu da Horta fills the Jesuit college left unfinished when the order was expelled from Portugal in 1760, and is best known for a collection of miniature sculptures carved from fig-tree pith by a local artist; above Peter Café Sport, the Scrimshaw Museum holds engraved whale teeth and bone, much of it made ashore by craftsmen who never went whaling. Check current hours for both.

On the GR1 coastal trail, the Fajã stretch from Praia do Norte to Capelinhos is the most striking section. If you want a longer day, the park's Dez Vulcões route (PR06FAI) is a linear traverse of some nineteen kilometres, reckoned at about five hours, starting at the Caldeira viewpoint and finishing at Capelinhos, crossing the ten volcanic cones strung along the Capelo peninsula's fissure. Take a whale-watching boat from the marina between April and October; the operators are licensed, and the captains were, until the 1980s, working whalers. For the shorter, closer version of the same story, walk the Entre Montes trail (PRC08FAI) over Monte da Guia, the twin-coned headland of some seventy-four hectares that closes Porto Pim bay, and visit the Porto Pim whaling factory below it, kept as a museum alongside the Azores Sea Observatory.

Add a Pico day-trip by ferry for a climb up the volcano, the highest point in Portugal at 2,351 metres, or a wine tasting in the Lajido vineyards with their black lava enclosure walls. Back on Faial, the western parishes reward slow driving: the cliffs at Varadouro, the laurel forest at Cabeço dos Trinta, the hydrangea hedges that flower through midsummer. Then let the day slow to the speed of a marina coffee, with the painted harbour murals as your reading matter. That is what Faial does best.

• Language: Portuguese; English widely spoken in Horta, less so in the western parishes
• Currency: euro
• Plug: European type F/C
• Money: ATMs in Horta; cards accepted in town, cash needed in the smaller villages
• Mobile: Mobile coverage is good across the island and along most coastal trails
• Health: Pharmacy and small hospital in Horta; serious cases air-evacuated to São Miguel or Lisbon
• Good to know: Time zone is UTC−1 (one hour behind mainland Portugal)