Feel an Island (Vila do Corvo – Corvo)

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Corvo Island exists beyond “Caldeirão” (Cauldron). The vast majority of the island’s visitors arrive on the boat from Flores Island and have a transport hired from a agency (or even from individuals) waiting to take them to “Caldeirão”. This is indeed the greatest attraction of the island, with various “lakes” in the crater and its islets of an intense green. An unforgettable landscape that seems to be impossible in this world and therefore is the greatest postcard of the smallest Azorean island. But visit “Caldeirão” is not the same of knowing Corvo Island.
To know this island you need to be unhurried, getting along with Corvo inhabitants and how they live in a genuine and hospitable simplicity.
I’m talking about a small rock in the middle of the ocean where in the loneliness we do not feel alone, where the conversation is easy and openhearted. Testimony of this occurred in the Volunteer Firefighters bar when I ask if they served soup to the baby, and after a negative response from the employee explaining that the bar did not have restaurant service, a man that sits at a table overheard the conversation and without knowing us, he offers to go home and get a bowl of soup to give to the baby. We thank him kindly, impressed with this immediate availability of an stranger, but it was not necessary because we had alternatives. We were thinking about it.

To know this island you need to be unhurried, getting along with Corvo inhabitants and how they live in a genuine and hospitable simplicity.

It happened to us something similar in Trás-os-Montes a few years ago. Is it a feature of the most isolated populations? Does the size of the heart and open arms hospitality increase in the same proportion to the distance to major urban centers?
Honestly I can not set a standard because at the trips that I have done in Portugal this is actually a country that knows how to receive. But there are places that mark us in a different way. There are places that shows us what is the essence of being Portuguese, always available to help others in a hospitality recognized worldwide. If the isolation, on the one hand harden the soul, on the other hand can open the hearts of men.
So if you are thinking of visiting Corvo Island go and let it be for a few days. Traverse the streets of the town, the cliffs, visit “Caldeirão” and discover “Cara do Índio” (Indian Face) but above all know Corvo inhabitants, his stories and legends. Soon you also feel that you are already part of that small but so large rock.
I returned with the feeling that I did not come to Corvo, I came home and part of us is always at home, isn’t it?

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