Capelinhos

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. Capelinhos is the land an undersea eruption added to the island in thirteen months: about 2.4 square kilometres of ash, cinder and lava pushed out into the Atlantic. Seen from the clifftop, the contrast is stark – green pastures and stone walls on one side, a bare volcanic cone and dunes of dark tephra on the other, still almost without trees or shrubs decades after the eruption ended.

The activity began offshore. After some two hundred earthquakes in mid-September 1957, the sea about a kilometre beyond the lighthouse began to boil, and on 27 September an eruption broke the surface a few hundred metres off the point. Within weeks a small island had risen from the water; locals gave it several names, among them Ilha Nova, "the New Island". A handful of journalists and a boat pilot landed on it long enough to plant a Portuguese flag before it collapsed back into the sea at the end of October. A second cone formed in November and was soon joined to Faial by an isthmus. Explosive phases alternated with lava flows until the last projectiles were seen on 24 October 1958. Ash buried fields and roofs in the parishes of Capelo and Praia do Norte, some three hundred houses were destroyed and about two thousand people were evacuated, though no one died. The Azorean Refugee Act passed by the US Congress in 1958, backed by John O. Pastore and the young senator John F. Kennedy, opened the way for 1,500 islanders to emigrate, and Capelo lost half its population.

For science, Capelinhos was a landmark: it was the first submarine eruption recorded from its first bubbles to its end, and because it happened beside an inhabited island with good communications it was observed in unusual detail. Its shallow-water, steam-driven explosions are of the kind later named Surtseyan after the Icelandic island that appeared in 1963; Azorean volcanologist Victor Hugo Forjaz has argued that the style should rather bear the name of Capelinhos, which came first. In 2022 the International Union of Geological Sciences listed it among its first hundred geological heritage sites. The lighthouse, begun in 1894 and lit in 1903, was abandoned in November 1957; ash piled up around it until only its upper storey and tower remained above ground. A visitor centre now lies in the cliff beside it, and footpaths lead from the headland inland towards the caldera at the island's summit.

Getting there

Capelinhos lies at the western end of Faial in the Azores. Horta, the island's main town and port, is about 20 km to the east in a straight line. Horta Airport (HOR) is about 13.5 km away. Ponta Delgada, the largest city of the archipelago, is on the island of São Miguel, roughly 290 km to the east.