Azores

The eastern part is the most settled. Fields are cut into squares by dark stone walls, cows graze close to the road, and the old towns climb in terraces of cobbled streets and pastel houses with white window frames. The centre feels older and wetter. Roads wind up through forest of cedar and tree fern to the rims of craters, where lakes sit inside the cones and cloud settles on the ridges like a lid. The west is the quietest. Villages are few and far apart, the cliffs are sheer, and the sense of having reached an edge of the map comes on gradually, with fewer cars and longer silences on the road.

A day in the region tends to begin in a harbour town, where men mend nets on the quay and the café opens early for coffee served in small glass cups. Bread is still baked in the morning, and the sweet loaves are dense and faintly smoky. From there the land calls for walking. Coastal paths run along the tops of cliffs, and at the bottom the sea finds its way into black rock pools and through natural arches, sending white spray up with a sound that carries for a long way. In the villages near the old volcanic springs, the traditional stew is still set in clay pots and buried in warm ground for hours, then lifted out at lunchtime with the steam pouring off it. Inland, tea estates lie in neat green rows, and farm shops sell cheese, honey and the island's dark bread without any fuss about it.

What lingers after such a day is not a single view but the way the region moves between its parts: pasture giving way to forest, forest to crater lake, and lake to a coast so steep and so empty that it seems to belong to the weather. The sea is not a backdrop here. It is the reason the roads bend, the houses face inward, and the bread arrives warm. Anyone who spends a few days in the Azores tends to leave with the sense of having been slightly remote from the rest of the world, and with a wish to stay a little longer, watching the cloud come down over the cliffs.