February 2025.
Ponta Delgada, São Miguel, Portugal.

Sailing into port aboard the Norwegian Bliss, I got my first good look at Ponta Delgada, but we were late in our arrival. From this vantage point, as we approached the dock, the city stretched along the coast begging for a cellpic. White buildings glowing in the morning light, verdant green hills, and a mountain peak in the background finally became clearly visible.

Ponta Delgada is the capital of São Miguel, the largest island in Portugal’s Azores archipelago. The Azores are a group of nine volcanic islands in the North Atlantic, about 1,000 miles (1600 km) west of mainland Portugal. Upon our arrival, Ponta Delgada was cloaked in mystery. At first, the buildings on the shore were completely shrouded in cloud, but as we approached, the skies gave up their disguise. Still, we were not allowed to dock. As the ship approached, it was parallel to the dock at one point when the Captain announced that the seas were too rough to tie up. The vessel made a large oval heading a short distance back to sea and then paralleled the shore from a distance. After about an hour delay, the seas calmed enough to allow the crew to dock the ship.

When we finally docked, a Portuguese Navy ship was tied down on the pier beside us. I was able to find the details using an AI search about the patrol, surveillance, and search and rescue ship, as indicated by the large F471 painted on her side. The ship, commissioned in 1971, remains on active duty despite its age, undergoing regular upgrades and continuing to serve in various maritime missions, including operations around former Portuguese territories.

When we were finally allowed to disembark for our excursion, we boarded a tour bus to view the countryside. Our first stop was the Plantação de Ananás dos Açores in Ponta Delgada, where pineapples are grown not in tropical fields, but in glass greenhouses using traditional techniques unique to the Azores.

The English translation of Plantação de Ananás dos Açores is “Pineapple Plantation in the Azores”. It’s a straightforward name, but it carries significant cultural weight. In the mid-1800s, São Miguel’s orange trade collapsed when a devastating fungus wiped out citrus groves across the island. With their main export gone, local farmers scrambled for a replacement crop. They found it in the smooth Cayenne pineapple, which was initially brought from South America as an ornamental plant. Though the island’s climate wasn’t warm enough for outdoor cultivation, growers built thousands of glass greenhouses to mimic tropical conditions. By 1864, pineapples were being exported to England, and the Azores had reinvented themselves as producers of some of the sweetest, most distinctive pineapples in the world.

As we walked through a handful of greenhouses, our guide described the life cycle of the pineapple, each greenhouse showcasing a different stage of the growth cycle. Photographs in each greenhouse reflected the work done in cultivating the Azorean pineapples, which carry a Protected Designation of Origin (PDO) label, certifying their authenticity and tying them to São Miguel’s unique greenhouse cultivation method.

Their slow growth cycle (up to two years per fruit) and limited production make them more of a luxury or specialty item than a bulk commodity. In short, Azorean pineapples aren’t flooding supermarket shelves worldwide. But, like Hawaiian chocolate, they hold their own as a cultivated treasure in the premium fruit market.

And just like that, our first glimpse of Ponta Delgada comes to an end, but not without a taste of the island’s rural life. Next up, we are back in the bus seats and heading inland, where winding roads lead to volcanic lakes nestled high in the mountains. The views become wilder, the air gets cooler, and the island again shrouds itself in mystery.

About the photos: For the photography inclined, I am learning how to take full advantage of the Nikon Mirrorless camera, a Z7 II, that I acquired before our South African journey. I used to bracket my images to create a high dynamic range in my D500, and my D7000 before it. The 45MP sensor on the Z7 II has a high dynamic range that I can bring out in Luminar Neo with a single exposure, thus saving me time in generating HDR images. You can see the results of the combination with the Nikkor Z 28-400mm f/4-8 VR lens in 2K HD on my Flickr site here.

John Steiner