The first half of 2025 was marked by an uncharacteristic amount of domestic travel for me as I bounced between New England and the Bay Area for both business and leisure (or “bleisure”), and just generally catching up with friends. This was all a slow build to my first international trip of the year: Portugal. Specifically, the capital city of Lisbon followed by the island of São Miguel. My first visit to both of these locales!
São Miguel is part of an autonomous island chain called the Azores (or Açores in Portuguese) which sits almost 900 miles off the coast of Portugal. Despite having never visited before, I was already quite familiar with the islands by virtue of growing up in Massachusetts where Azorean migrants settled throughout the 19th century thanks to the whaling and fishing industries. That’s more of a happy coincidence rather than the reason I ventured to the island, but it added an extra layer of context to the trip!
Beyond the historical connection with my hometown, the other attraction of São Miguel is the hiking. The Azores are volcanic islands, after all, and the combination of rolling green hills and black sandy beaches rising together out of the Atlantic is pretty stunning to see up close.
In fact, the geography varies immensely depending on which part of the island (and what elevation) you happen to be in. Having completed six different hikes across some 30+ miles of the island, the landscape seemingly shifted between the dense tropical rainforests of Hawaii, the fog-enveloped pine trees of the Pacific Northwest, the hedgerows and cow-dotted countrysides of England, and the ancient cedar forests of Japan. Sometimes all on the same hike!
Given the amount of walking, I kept my camera gear light with just my Leica M2, a Voigtlander 35mm f/1.4 lens, and who knows how many rolls of Kodak Ultramax 400 film. Photos can’t quite capture the beauty of the environment—particularly if you have my luck and your light meter runs out of battery early in the trip resulting in some particularly grainy photos 😫—but you get the idea!
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Lisbon (where we visited before heading to the Azores) and Ponta Delgada (the capital of the island chain and our last stop on São Miguel Island) provided nice, metropolitan bookends to a week of hiking. Lisbon with its warm people, exciting culture, and amazing food lives up to everything you’ve heard about it. And like São Miguel, it also resembles some international doppelgängers. To my eye, the views in Lisbon actually reminded me of San Francisco at times.
Ponta Delgada is a much smaller city, but equally as beautiful. And the combination of fishing, farming, and tourist industries means the food is absolutely incredible. A++ would recommend!
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