Rocha dos Bordões
Interesting facts
- The basalt columns stand about 20 metres tall, yet each is only a few decimetres across.
- The lava flow that formed them is roughly 570,000 years old, making the columns remarkably well preserved for their age.
- The rock is a trachybasalt that cracked into prisms as it cooled while still flowing and settling into place.
- Rocha dos Bordões is a priority geosite of the Azores UNESCO Global Geopark, rated of national importance.
- Flores was first sighted in 1452 by the navigator Diogo de Teive and his son João, and early maps called it São Tomás and Santa Iria.
- Tennyson's ballad 'The Revenge' opens with Sir Richard Grenville lying at Flores, recalling a 1591 sea battle off the island.
- Nearby Monchique Islet, off the west coast of Flores, is the westernmost point of Portugal.
Why it is worth it
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. Vegetation clings to the ledges between the columns, and several streams run down the rock face and gather into waterfalls. Nothing else in the Azores looks quite like it, and the formation is often compared with the Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, which it exceeds in size.
The columns are the product of a thick flow of basalt that cooled quickly. As lava shrinks while it solidifies, it cracks into a regular network of joints, and in a thick, uniform layer those cracks propagate through the whole mass, dividing it into long polygonal prisms – the process geologists call columnar jointing. Here the lava is thought to have filled the interior of a volcanic cone; over thousands of years erosion stripped away the outer parts of the volcano and exposed the jointed core. At the foot of the cliff lies another curiosity, the Águas Quentes, a cluster of small bubbling springs of sulphurous water.
Flores lies far out in the Atlantic on the North American plate, and is often counted as the westernmost point of Europe; its field boundaries and roadsides are lined with blue hydrangeas. The Rocha dos Bordões stands at a place called Cabo Baixo das Casas in the parish of Mosteiro, in the municipality of Lajes das Flores in the south-west of the island. The Azorean regional government began the process of classifying it as a natural monument in 2004, and since 2011 it has been part of the Flores Natural Park.
Getting there
The Rocha dos Bordões is in the south-west of Flores, in the municipality of Lajes das Flores. The island's main town and airport are at Santa Cruz das Flores; Flores Airport (FLW) is about 11 km away. Ponta Delgada on São Miguel, the largest city of the Azores, is more than 500 km away across the sea; Flores is reached by air or by sea from the other islands.
On these lists
39.40611, -31.24194per Wikidata