The Most Beautiful Places in the Azores
11 places · updated 13 October 2026
In short: By our ranking, the most beautiful places in the Azores are Algar do Carvão, Lagoa das Sete Cidades and Lagoa do Fogo. The list covers 11 places. Last updated 13 October 2026.
The Azores sit in the middle of the Atlantic where the North American, Eurasian and African plates meet, and the islands are the exposed tops of volcanoes rising from that junction. Within Portugal they are the young, restless part of the country: calderas filled with lakes, lava tubes, hot springs and fresh basalt coasts, all kept green by mild, wet ocean air. What mainland Portugal shows as history, the Azores show as geology still at work.
On São Miguel, Lagoa das Sete Cidades fills a vast caldera with twin lakes, one reading blue and the other green, while Lagoa do Fogo lies in a higher crater ringed by steep, undeveloped slopes. At Ponta da Ferraria a hot spring runs straight into the ocean, so the sea warms among the lava rocks. On Terceira, Algar do Carvão is a rare volcanic vent that visitors can descend into, its walls coated with silica formations and a small lake at the bottom.
Pico carries Mount Pico, the highest point in Portugal, a near-perfect cone that dominates the channel to neighbouring islands. Below it, the vineyards of Pico are a UNESCO landscape of small plots enclosed by black basalt walls, built to shield the vines from wind and salt. Far to the west on Flores, Rocha dos Bordões shows rows of basalt columns standing up a green hillside.
In this list
| # | Place | Type | UNESCO |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Algar do Carvão | Cave | |
| 2 | Lagoa das Sete Cidades | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 3 | Lagoa do Fogo | Volcanic crater lake | |
| 4 | Mount Pico | Volcano | |
| 5 | Capelinhos | Volcano | |
| 6 | Pico Island Vineyards | Vineyard landscape | ✓ |
| 7 | São Miguel Island | Island | |
| 8 | Ilhéu de Vila Franca | Island | |
| 9 | Rocha dos Bordões | Rock formation | |
| 10 | Ponta da Ferraria | Hot spring | |
| 11 | Fajã dos Cubres | Lagoon |
01 Algar do Carvão
Portugal · 8.7 km from Angra do Heroísmo38.729° N 27.214° W
Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 Algar do Carvão is one of the rare places on Earth where you can walk down inside the throat of a volcano. In the middle of the island of Terceira, among pastures and cedar scrub, a dark opening about 15 by 20 metres leads into a vertical chimney that drops some 90 metres to a pool of rainwater.
Did you know? The shaft drops 45 metres vertically, then descends an 18-metre ramp of debris and a second drop to the lake, about 90 metres in all.
02 Lagoa das Sete Cidades
Portugal · 15.9 km from Ponta Delgada37.855° N 25.786° W
Image by katharina-kiese from Pixabay At the western end of São Miguel, the largest island of the Azores, the ground falls away into a caldera roughly six by five kilometres wide, and on its floor lies the biggest body of fresh water in the archipelago.
Did you know? The lake is about 30 metres deep at its deepest point, despite covering more than four square kilometres.
03 Lagoa do Fogo
Portugal · 17.3 km from Ponta Delgada37.763° N 25.471° W
Image by funsk8 from Pixabay Lagoa do Fogo, the "Lake of Fire", fills the summit caldera of the Água de Pau volcano in the middle of São Miguel, the largest island of the Azores. 5 km and up to 30 m deep, with a sandy beach along its shore. On misty days the lake appears and vanishes as clouds drift across the crater.
Did you know? A further, smaller eruption broke out in the caldera on 13 February 1564 and lasted only a few days.
04 Mount Pico
Montanha do Pico
Portugal · 22.6 km from Horta38.469° N 28.399° W
José Luís Ávila Silveira/Pedro Noronha e Costa · Public domain Rising straight out of the Atlantic to 2,351 metres, Mount Pico is the highest point of Portugal and stands more than twice as tall as any other summit in the Azores.
Did you know? A rare plant, Silene vulgaris cratericola, grows only on this mountain and only above about 2,200 m.
05 Capelinhos
Vulcão dos Capelinhos
Portugal · 17.9 km from Horta38.601° N 28.832° W
Image by Comanche0 from Pixabay At the western tip of Faial, a half-buried stone lighthouse stands at the edge of a raw grey-brown headland that did not exist before 1957. 4 square kilometres of ash, cinder and lava pushed out into the Atlantic.
Did you know? The eruption's tallest column rose about 1,450 metres, and winds carried its ash some 20 kilometres from the vent.
06 Pico Island Vineyards
Portugal · 9.3 km from Horta38.513° N 28.541° W
- UNESCO World Heritage
Navin75 · CC BY-SA 2.0 On the west coast of Pico, in the middle of the Atlantic, the ground is black lava, and the vineyards are built out of it. For five centuries islanders cleared the broken basalt by hand and stacked it into long, low dry-stone walls that divide the slopes into thousands of tiny rectangles called currais.
Did you know? Terrantez do Pico came close to extinction in the 20th century and has been nursed back to just under 50 hectares of vines.
07 São Miguel Island
Portugal · 15.8 km from Ponta Delgada37.800° N 25.500° W
Image by Comanche0 from Pixabay São Miguel, the largest island of the Azores at about 760 km², is a string of volcanoes fused together in the middle of the Atlantic, and its nickname, Ilha Verde — the Green Island — describes what that ground has become: crater walls under pasture and forest, lakes lying in the floors of old calderas.
Did you know? Between 1439 and 1444, soon after settlement, an eruption at Sete Cidades reshaped the west; returning sailors found the coast transformed and pumice floating offshore.
08 Ilhéu de Vila Franca
Portugal · 20.1 km from Ponta Delgada37.706° N 25.444° W
Jules Verne Times Two · CC BY-SA 4.0 Just off the south coast of São Miguel in the Azores, a ring of dark volcanic rock rises from the Atlantic and encloses an almost perfectly round lagoon of calm, clear water.
Did you know? During the 1522 earthquake and again in the seismic crisis of 1563, ships and townspeople fled to the islet as a refuge from the shaking shore.
09 Rocha dos Bordões
Portugal39.406° N 31.242° W
Unukorno · CC BY-SA 3.0 On the island of Flores, the westernmost of the Azores, a whole hillside appears to be made of organ pipes. The Rocha dos Bordões is a towering wall of basalt split into tall, slender vertical columns that rise side by side like a giant bundle of staffs – the "bordões" of its name.
Did you know? Rocha dos Bordões is a priority geosite of the Azores UNESCO Global Geopark, rated of national importance.
10 Ponta da Ferraria
Portugal · 19.9 km from Ponta Delgada37.853° N 25.850° W
The Cosmonaut · CC BY-SA 4.0 At the far western tip of São Miguel in the Azores, a black lava platform juts into the Atlantic below a high sea cliff, and in a rocky inlet on its edge the ocean itself runs warm.
Did you know? Tillard published his eyewitness account of the eruption in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 1812.
11 Fajã dos Cubres
Portugal38.534° N 28.629° W
Alberto Garcia from Cartagena, Spain · CC BY-SA 2.0 Below the sheer green cliffs of São Jorge's northern coast, a flat tongue of land pushes out into the Atlantic, and on it lies a quiet saltwater lagoon with a cluster of houses and a small white chapel at its edge.
Did you know? Fishing for mullet and anchovy in the lagoon was once a local practice but is now prohibited.
How this list is ranked
Places are chosen for how they look, not for how famous they are: each one has its own description and a photograph credited to its author. The order is a single world ranking that weighs the beauty of the place in curated photography together with how widely it is documented — the number of language editions of its encyclopedia article and how often that article is read in a year. The list is rebuilt as places are added, so the order and the counts on this page are always current.
Questions people ask
- What are the most beautiful places in the Azores?
- On our list, Algar do Carvão ranks first, followed by Lagoa das Sete Cidades and Lagoa do Fogo.
- Why are the Azores volcanic?
- The islands lie on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge near the junction of three tectonic plates, where magma reaches the surface and builds volcanoes from the ocean floor. Several Azorean volcanoes have erupted in historical times.
- What is the highest mountain in Portugal?
- Mount Pico on Pico Island in the Azores is the highest mountain in Portugal, at about 2,351 metres. It is a stratovolcano rising directly from the sea.
- Why are the Pico vineyards protected by stone walls?
- The walls of dark basalt, called currais, break the Atlantic wind and keep salt spray off the vines while storing the day's heat. The walled vineyard landscape of Pico is a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
- What kinds of places are there to see in the Azores?
- In our collection, the places in the Azores are most often volcanoes (2), crater lakes (2), islands (2) and nature sanctuaries (2).
- How many places are on this list in the Azores?
- The list covers 11 places.