Bagacina

We had arranged to meet Lucinda and Mateus’s son, Marco, who was willing to provide us with a tour of Terceira. He was born in Winnipeg and spent the first 6 years of his life there so his English was very good. We agreed to a 2 day tour for €60 each and because it was a beautiful sunny, warm day he recommended we go now. So we packed a picnic lunch and were on our way to the interior of the island.

Our first stop was the Miradoura (viewpoint) do Facho, where there is a monument of a nun who overlooks and protects the city of Praia da Vitoria. It was a gift from George Bush after the Iraq war “victory”, as there was a large US Air Force base here at the time, now reduced to about 180 servicemen and women. The views were spectacular and there were more to come. We took a short drive to another viewpoint that showed the almost deserted airbase and the very long runway for an island of this size. In 2001, an Air Transat Airbus 330 heading to Lisbon with 306 passengers ran out of fuel and glided 120 km to an emergency safe landing on this runway, beating the previous record set by the Gimli Glider incident.

The next stop was to the 2nd highest peak on the island, Serra do Cume, at 545 metres (1800 feet). The highest peak is almost always under cloud cover. The view of the patchwork fields created by the volcanic stone walls was simply amazing but Marco said that later in the year when different crops of different colours are growing it almost looks like a patchwork quilt. This flat area is actually a caldera that stretches for 15 km.Read more