São Miguel is the largest of the Azores and the one most travellers visit first. Locals call it Ilha Verde — the Green Island — and the name fits: rolling pastures, forests of cryptomeria and eucalyptus, and roadside walls of hydrangeas that bloom blue and pink in summer. It is also the most varied of the islands, packing crater lakes, hot springs, sea cliffs, tea plantations, and a handsome port town into a strip 67 km long.
The big-ticket sight is Sete Cidades, a vast collapsed volcano in the west whose floor cradles two lakes — one a deep blue, the other emerald green. The view from the Vista do Rei viewpoint on the crater rim is the postcard image of the Azores, and the rim trails make for one of the best half-day walks in the Atlantic. Further east, Lagoa do Fogo sits in another caldera, harder to reach and all the better for it: a quiet white-sand beach inside a volcano.
The island's other defining experience is Furnas, a town in a steaming volcanic basin where bubbling fumaroles vent at the lake shore and locals bury pots of cozido — a slow-cooked stew of meats and vegetables — in the hot earth. Eat one for lunch (book ahead), then soak in the iron-rich thermal pool at the Terra Nostra botanical garden. Nearby Caldeira Velha offers a wilder, less manicured hot-spring bathe in a forest setting.
Between the headline sights there is plenty to fill a week. Ponta Delgada is the elegant capital, a grid of whitewashed houses trimmed in black basalt. The north coast around Ribeira Grande is wilder, with surf breaks and the Gorreana tea plantation — the only tea grown in Europe, and well worth the tour. Off the coast the deep Atlantic waters are some of the best in the world for whale and dolphin watching: sperm whales are resident year-round, and blue and fin whales pass through in spring.
Get a car if you can — the bus network exists but is slow, and the joy of São Miguel is stopping when you want at the next viewpoint, the next cheese shop, the next stretch of cliff.
