Furnas

Steam rises from the ground in plumes. The earth hisses. At Furnas the sulphur smell hits before the sight — yellow-crusted fumaroles bubbling beside the lake shore, iron-rich water staining the rocks orange. Then you notice the pots buried in the volcanic soil along the lake edge, stew slow-cooking underground since morning.

Furnas is an active volcanic valley on eastern São Miguel, its caldera holding hot springs, fumaroles and geothermal pools bathed in and cooked with for centuries. The signature is cozido das Furnas — a layered stew of meats, sausages and vegetables lowered into the geothermal ground each morning and excavated for lunch, the earth itself the stove at around boiling heat for six patient hours. Terra Nostra's gardens, begun in the eighteenth century, wrap the great iron-orange thermal pool in thousands of subtropical plant species — one of the Atlantic's finest botanical collections. On the coast nearby, the Gorreana estate — Europe's oldest tea plantation — has run green and black tea down Atlantic-facing slopes since 1883. The whole valley steams, hisses and feeds you; restoration is the business model of the geology itself.