Santa Maria

The sand is the wrong shade for the Azores. On Santa Maria, beaches glow gold and ochre instead of the black volcanic norm, and inland the Barreiro da Faneca spreads a rust-red clay desert across the plateau — a miniature badlands that belongs in Arizona, not the mid-Atlantic. This island plays by different geological rules.

Santa Maria is the oldest and southernmost of the Azores, and its age shows: while the younger islands wear black basalt, its long-weathered volcanic and sedimentary rocks have opened into golden sand — Praia Formosa is the archipelago's great natural beach — red clay formations, and fossil-bearing marine layers from epochs when the island sat partly beneath the sea, the São Lourenço bays exposing them in orange cliffs above vineyard terraces. The climate runs warmer and drier than the lush central islands, more Mediterranean in its figs and vines, with the most sunshine in the archipelago. The Maré de Agosto tradition — among Portugal's longest-running music festivals — has belonged to Praia Formosa's sand for decades, and the island's oversized runway remembers its days as the mid-Atlantic's wartime refuelling stop. A few thousand residents keep the island's secret well.