Flores

Waterfalls drop directly into the sea. Not into rivers that reach the sea — into the Atlantic itself, freefalling from green cliff edges into salt spray. Flores earns its name from the hydrangeas lining every road, but the island's true character is vertical: water falling, cliffs rising, cloud descending.

Flores is Europe's westernmost fringe — farther from Lisbon than Marrakech is, closer to the New World than feels reasonable — a 143-square-kilometre island of the Azores' western group holding seven crater lakes, the deep Lagoa Funda among them, in permanently green uplands fed by the archipelago's heaviest rainfall. That rain powers the signature: the waterfall wall behind Fajã Grande, where the Poço do Bacalhau plunges ninety metres, and the cascades that leap straight off the coastal cliffs into the ocean. The Rocha dos Bordões raises its organ-pipe basalt columns in the interior — among the Atlantic's most dramatic volcanic sculpture — and a population under four thousand keeps a pace the better-connected islands have begun to lose. Open-boat whaling worked these harbours into the 1980s — living memory here, not distant history — and the whales still pass the same coast.