Flores Island, Azores

I didn’t sleep very well last night cause we were still hopped up on adrenaline from the crazy boat ride to Flores.

Our bnb is up top of a hill with a great view of the town of Santa Cruz and the Atlantic Ocean. We could see the whitecaps and big waves, it’s no wonder there’s no boat crossings today.

First up was some admin stuff. Our driver from yesterday met us at 10:45 to drive us to the car rental pickup at the airport in Santa Cruz. The Ilha Verde folks were very quick. In the meantime, Heather dropped into the Info booth and got some good tips on seeing the island. Aside from the big winds, there was good visibility and it was a good day to tour around Flores, per the info lady.

We then stopped into a little cafe for breakfast. Breakfast isn’t much of a thing here, so we just had a cappuccino and bread with cheese, enough to keep us going. We then stopped into the local supermarket, Helios, to stock up on breakfast supplies for the next few days.

We drove back up to our bnb to get ourselves situated. The rental was a Renault Clio, a fun little car to drive. CarPlay worked well with the car.

We cut across the island on the ER2-2 towards Fajã Grande (there’s only two major roads in Flores, ER1-2 which circumnavigates the island from 12 o’clock to 9; and ER2-2 which goes straight from 9 o’clock to 3). We stopped at a few miradouros (lookout points) to take pics.

We had lunch at an ocean-side little restaurant and had bifanas, the best ones we’ve had this trip. We got there around 2:05 and the kitchen closed at 2pm but luckily they still served us.

Then we did a little more driving around and sightseeing. The area around Fajã Grande is surrounded by 600m cliffs, from which dozens of waterfalls make their way down. There’s lots of hikes in and around the area, although a bit technical cause of the extreme up-and-downs. The hikes are all rated difficult on AllTrails. However, there’s lots of miradouros accessible from the road, which is what we did.

We took the long way home, circling south through Lajes das Flores. Along the way we passed by Rocha dos Bordões, basalt rocks shaped like pipe organs. We’ve seen these in different countries, most recently in Iceland.

There’s a beautiful tiled church in Fazenda which we made a detour to get some pics.

We stopped at a few more miradouros on the way back to the bnb.

We didn’t have much time to relax as we wanted to get to Restaurante O Moreão for dinner. It was one of the few restaurants open this early in the season, and was packed. We waited 10 minutes to get seated, and then over an hour for our food. The restaurant only seats about 30 people, of which 20 were taken up by a group. We got stuck behind the group in our food orders, thus the wait. We had grilled squid skewers and grilled swordfish, both of which were excellent.

It was past 10pm by the time we got home, and we fell fast asleep.