Algar do Carvao

The ‘Algar do Carvão’ is one of the few volcanoes of its kind in the world that can be visited from the inside. The lava solidified on the walls preventing the volcano from collapsing and creating a caldera. It formed a ‘chimney’, open to the surface. Apparently there are only two in the world that you can go inside - one in Terceira and one in Indonesia.

We bought our tickets, went down some stairs and then walked down a narrow tunnel-like passageway. The floor was wet and we had to be careful we didn’t slip or twist our ankles again.

The tunnel opened into a mini Jurassic park. The small green plants covered the walls of the hole and it was beautiful. Birds were chirping and water dripped down on us. Looking up we could see the opening of the lava tube and the sky and clouds. To give you an idea of the perspective, the opening is 17 x 27 metres (approx 51 x 81 feet).

When you look down at this point you think that you can see the whole cave, but there are many levels and flights of stairs to descend to get to the bottom. Actually there are 338 stairs.

On the way down, there are two large ‘halls’ created by the attempts of lava to go outside before forming the impressive“chimney” where it actually came out. At a certain level, we could see a large lake at the bottom.

One of the two halls is called the“cathedral“, where the lava gave the room a round shape as it couldn’t break through to the surface due to the hardness of the rock. The walls of this ‘cathedral’ are colourful, greens, browns, reds, blacks, etc. The acoustics are good so at times small concerts are performed here.

Beautiful flower-shaped stalactites (amorphous silica stalactites) covered the walls. It is hard to explain how awesome this place was.

Nowadays, in order to visit such a place we only had to go down the stairs , but can you imagine what it would be like to enter here with ropes from above? When we exited, we looked at old photos of explorers who first explored this chimney. In 1893, they went down the hole tied on with ropes, with several men placed around the rim holding the ropes.

The Algar was only opened to the public in the late 60’s. The tunnel was built and then the access stairs. At a later date it was expanded and then improved several times.

Legend has it that a shepherd, looking for a goat that was missing in his flock, found this impressive hole in the ground.

Both of us were blown away by seeing this impressive sight. What an incredible experience we had, visiting this 90-meter deep structure built by nature 2000 years ago.Read more