Pico Vineyards

Pico is bare black lava and wind, and growing vines on it required an answer to both. The answer was the currais: thousands of small rectangular plots, each a few metres across, enclosed by dry-stone walls of lava rock about a metre and a half high, built by hand from the ground being cleared, which shelter the vines from salt wind and hold the day's heat in the black stone through the night. Seen from above the landscape is a grid of black walls running from the shore inland over several hundred hectares. Settlers built it from the fifteenth century, and the Verdelho wine it produced was exported to Russia and northern Europe in quantity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries before phylloxera and disease destroyed the industry. Replanting has revived it. UNESCO listed the landscape in 2004; there are marked trails, a wine museum at Madalena and producers taking visitors.

What you actually see

• The currais - thousands of small plots walled in lava rock against the wind.
• The grid - black walls running over several hundred hectares from the shore inland.
• The Verdelho - the wine exported to Russia and northern Europe before phylloxera.
• The UNESCO listing - the landscape inscribed in 2004.

When to go

April to October; harvest in late summer is when the plots are worked. Two to four hours walking the trails. Producers and the museum take visitors year-round.

Honest expectations

No shade at all among the walls, and the black rock holds heat. The trails are over rough lava. Many plots are abandoned and scrubbing over. Pico's flights and ferries are weather-dependent.

Nearby

Gruta das Torres is close; Madalena and the Faial ferry are north.