Azores 2026 - Easing Gently Into Island Life

It was a good sleep.

We awoke to a sunny and cloudless morning in the house of Manuel Cabrinha in the town of Livramento on the island of Sao Miguel. Here, the windows remain open and the few bugs that do live on the island stay in their lanes, while the morning church bells alert you of the time each hour on the hour. Just count the bells to know when it is time to get up.

In Canada I often think of the breakfasts we enjoy in the Azores. They begin with a three minute walk to the Pingo Dolce neighbourhood grocery store to pick up freshly made buns, and my god are they good…and cheap. Six delicious fat buns cost just over one euro. You can also pick up thinly sliced ham, eggs, any of two dozen varieties of cheese, a bag of muesli, local milk, and of course, the sweet local mini bananas that blow those Costa Rican honkers right out of the jungle. Having a small grocery store located within a residential neighbourhood is a concept lost on Canadian city planners, as we’ve been conditioned to drive in our trucks to a Costco or Superstore, buy massive quantities of low quality food, then jam in all into chest freezers in our basements, to be extracted piece by piece over a period of months, or sometimes lost and forgotten in the crumb-covered bottom of the appliance and eventually transferred to a garbage bin. In Livramento, if you are a little less mobile, or short of time in the morning, you can have the bread man leave a daily plastic bag containing fresh buns hanging from your doorknob each morning before 7am. This is what Tio Manuel does. It’s a hell of a good system.

Although the Pingo Doce has most of what you would ever need to eat, we took Ana’s folks for a trip to the large Continental grocery store to pick up some food, then stopped for a look at the always mesmerizing ocean pools in Lagoa, then continued eastward to the Villa Franca marina where we had coffee and tosta mistas beneath the glorious sunshine and 22 degrees of warmth. By the time we returned to Tio Manuel’s house, more of the family had gathered, and we spent the rest of the day eating, drinking and goofing around. Francisco and Cidalia, close family friends, also joined the party and it was a far later night than expected.