Azores (Bradt Travel Guide) - Softcover

David Sayers trained at the Royal Botanical Garden, Kew in London and is a field botanist. After careers in horticulture and social policy he ran a travel company offering specialist botanical tours worldwide. The Azores has long been his favorite destination and he pioneered the first walking holidays in the archipelago, an activity 30 years later now offered by many tour operators. As consultant he has refurbished three important public gardens on São Miguel, and is a freelance writer on botanical travel.

Graciosa, meaning gracious, is the most relaxed of all the islands. I can record little change in the 30 years since my first visit. The scenery is an idyll of pastures and enclosures, little clusters of whitewashed houses around village churches, occasional windmills... all surrounded by a glittering blue sea.

One summer I went across in a small boat from Pico to São Jorge and watched with fascination as the slow voyage gave diminishing detail of Pico's coast behind me and an increasing but narrowing view ahead of the little port and town of Velas. Approaching the harbor I could not but be aware of the huge presence of Pico Mountain behind me now that I was distant from it, its sharp cone at the forefront of the island, the high plateau behind like a girl's long hair in the wind.