Terceira, the second largest island in the archipelago, was the third island in the Azores to be discovered and colonized by the Portuguese and it is third in size (145 square miles) after São Miguel and Pico. It lies in the central group of islands, between São Miguel and Graciosa. For centuries Terceira was the most important and most developed island in the archipelago, only outpaced today by São Miguel, roughly 85 miles away to the south-east. It’s very different from São Miguel in landscape and atmosphere, yet just as Azorean in essence, with particularly fine Portuguese colonial palaces and mansions and more historic monuments than the rest of the island put together.
Tragically, many of those stately ‘sights’ have been turned into heaps of rubble, or at best rendered unsafe to visit, by the earthquake of 1980, which also hit the neighbouring islands of Graciosa and São Jorge. Over three-quarters of Terceira’s capital city, Angra do Heroísmo, was damaged by the earthquake, but the event warranted only a line or two in the world’s press because very few people were killed, merely shocked out of their wits and made suddenly homeless. It happened on the afternoon of New Year’s Day, when most Terceirans were out in the streets celebrating the holiday, otherwise many more casualties would have been trapped in the tumbling houses.
That day is etched into the minds of everyone in Angra do Heroísmo, and everyone has his own story of what he was doing at the time. Taxi drivers remember the road rippling slowly beneath them, and put it down to over-indulgence on New Year’s Eve. Billiard-players remember the ball bouncing off the table, apparently of its own volition, others remember goldfish leaping out of the bowls, swaying chimneys, cracks in the walls etc.
Tourist Office in Angra do Heroísmo is a busy, friendly and efficient place. Moreover, it was the south of the island that took the full brunt of the shock, much of the rest went unscathed. The American air base at Lajes, for example, apparently suffered no major structural damage at all.
The American presence is very strongly felt in Terceira, from the moment you arrive at the airport, in fact, among all those military aircraft. There are lots of notices and advertisements in English, clocks in the departure lounge show Boston and Montreal time as well as Azores time (one hour behind Greenwich Mean Time in winter, GMT in summer), and everywhere there are American automobiles and personnel. It was they who built the airport in the first place, in 1943, as a transit point for airborne troops flying to join the war in Europe. Now it’s even more important as a strategic location for NATO’s defence of the western hemisphere.
