O meu texto sobre a ilha de S.Miguel, Açores, foi selecionada entre mais de 2000 candidaturas e é uma das 80 histórias que compõe o livro Around the World in 80 pages 2017 Edition Book, da Navigator Paper. Podem ver a lista completa aqui.

My story from S.Miguel Island, in Azores, has been selected among more than 2000 applications to be one of the 80 stories of Navigator's book "Around the World in 80 pages 2017 Edition Book". Find the list of stories here.

January 2015

We walked up with caution. With the eyes nailed to the floor and our attention focused on the accumulation of water, on the dirty, worn out, inhabited walls, along the long corridor opened to the trees. A place without doors or people, covered with moss and entrenched with moisture, with us peeking through each one of the rooms covered with garbage and wear that characterizes the forgotten Monte Palace Hotel. There only remains the silence and the noise of the wind that goes through the openings where a door or a window should be.

AZORES:

A DIP IN THE IMMENSE LAGOON

The fishing nets are sewn flooded by the smell of fish. The air in Rabo de Peixe is made of scales, the sea has entered the houses and stayed, as if the village was the waves’ home. As we opened our car’s doors the men's mouths opened simultaneously. They were seating in the breakwater with the nets dispersed along the sidewalk, and the compliments would come out of their months as if they were saying hello, but the hands never stoped working. Black's striped white houses, arranged as if somebody had aligned them from the sky, were disposed in small parcels against the explosive green.

San Miguel. I wish I had the time to slowly taste your slopes, like the animals that digress along the hills as if the grass were a mattress.

We advanced old plates where "Caution" and "Danger" was written in orange paint, and, suddenly, we encountered this laceration crossing the wall, like a balcony into the immense green. We could not avoid the exaltation of the eyes, the slow opening of the mouth for a long 'aww'. There it was. The Lagoa das Sete Cidades, getting bigger at each step we took forward, like a boiler that swallows us. We turned our heads towards the trees that were trimmed, located in between the sea and the lagoon, where the sun turns the water of each one of the lakes into different colors. Will there be words to explain the beauty of nature?

I have the feeling that San Miguel island is a poem of Alberto Caeiro:

“If I speak of Nature it’s not because I know what it is

But because I love it, and for that very reason,

Because those who love never know what they love

Or why they love, or what love is.”

It is nature in pure state, with exalted colors, places almost untouched as if the world had stagnated in between these mountains, the cows that look like small dots in the immense green living with no rush, the Empadadas Lagoon that we discovered among trees and red land absent of tourists, as if it was a little secret of the island. We entered the car once again before the park closed its doors and we drove to another wonder with our eyes stuck in the vast blue that bursts against the green. But we would fall in love once again on the moment we drove up the mountain with the mysticism of the fog surrounding us, making people’s bodies seem lost in between the trees, while very few rays of the sun allowed us to see the ocean. Thank you San Pedro for the spectacle that made us fall in love with the Fogo Lagoon.