The Azores, Portugal's islands in the mid-Atlantic

Until the 1980s, men on the Azorean island of Pico still put out to sea in open wooden boats to hunt sperm whales, a trade the islands had learned in the nineteenth century from American whaling ships that stopped here to take on Azorean crew. Lookouts, vigias, stationed in small stone towers on the clifftops, would spot a whale's spout and signal the boats waiting below. The last hunt from Pico took place in 1987. The vigias are still there, and they are still used for exactly the same purpose: spotting whales from the shore, so that boats can go out and find them, only now the boats carry cameras rather than harpoons.

An archipelago that is closer to Newfoundland than to Lisbon

The nine islands of the Azores sit on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, roughly a thousand miles west of mainland Portugal and considerably closer to Newfoundland than to Lisbon, an autonomous region of Portugal that was uninhabited until Portuguese settlers arrived in the fifteenth century, much as Madeira had been. The volcanic seams that built the islands are still active in places: Faial's Capelinhos headland was created almost entirely by an eruption in 1957 and 1958 that added new land to the island's western tip, and the resulting black volcanic landscape, now partly reclaimed by scrub, is a stark reminder of how young this ground actually is.

Whales, still, but watched rather than hunted

The deep water close to several of the islands' shores means sperm whales are present year-round, and dozens of other species, from blue whales to common dolphins, pass through on seasonal migrations, making the Azores one of the more reliable places in the Atlantic to see whales from a boat rather than merely hope for a distant fin. The old whaling infrastructure, the vigias, the lookout towers and the shoreside factories where blubber was once rendered, has largely been repurposed as museums and interpretation centres rather than demolished, an unusually honest way of keeping the industry's history visible alongside the very different business that replaced it.

Vines behind stone walls, and a harbour covered in paintings

Pico, the same island the old whaling fleet sailed from, also grows wine in one of the more improbable vineyard landscapes in Europe: small plots enclosed by low black basalt walls, currais, built to shelter the vines from Atlantic wind and salt spray, a labour-intensive method that has earned the Pico Island Vineyard Culture a UNESCO World Heritage listing.

On neighbouring Faial, the marina at Horta has its own long-standing maritime tradition. Sailors who cross the Atlantic and put in here traditionally paint a memento of their boat and crossing directly onto the harbour wall or quayside, a custom said to bring good luck for the rest of the voyage and, more pointedly, bad luck for skippers who skip it. Decades of paintings now cover the walls, an informal, constantly repainted record of who has passed through, and a tradition that predates any of the whale-watching tour operators who now share the same harbour.

Getting there

The Azores are reached from Britain mostly by cruise, since the islands sit well off the usual Iberian coastal routes and lie too far out for most direct flights from UK airports. Fred. Olsen's fortnight from Liverpool calls at the archipelago and at Madeira; one 2027 sailing is timed around a solar eclipse, rare enough that the operator built the itinerary specifically to reach the islands for it. Ambassador's winter sunshine sailing from Tilbury takes in several of the smaller islands, Faial and São Jorge among them, before continuing to Madeira and the Canaries, a long Atlantic loop for anyone who wants all three archipelagos on a single trip.

Few British travellers give the Azores much thought before booking, if they think of them at all. Portugal's most remote territory, and arguably its wildest, deserves rather more than an afterthought.