Travel advice about trav­el­ing to Ter­ceira island from a fel­low trav­el­er (guest post by Kitti)

It was on the Face­book travel page called “Utazo­ma­jom” where I first read Kitti’s exper­i­ence about her vis­it to Ter­ceira island. I liked her storytelling so much, I asked her to write a guest post for Eden Azores about her adven­tures. I am delighted to say that she accep­ted the chal­lenge, and wrote the fol­low­ing very inform­a­tion­al post for you.

Per­son­al travel jour­ney, hints & tips

I am writ­ing this guest post with lots of joy and enthu­si­asm based on my memor­ies and the best of my know­ledge in the hopes that it will prove to be use­ful. We have been to Ter­ceira in 2017, so some things might have changed ever since, so the inform­a­tion I am provid­ing might not be 100% accur­ate, but please bear with us, hobby travelers.

Why Ter­ceira?

Our first time ever in Por­tugal was in 2016, when we vis­ited Lis­bon and Madeira. We were taken by the beauty of the coun­try, the kind­ness of its inhab­it­ants, and its indes­crib­able mood. You could say we are back­pack­ers, so Por­tugal is a supreme choice if you are con­sid­er­ing the price / value ratio: you get beau­ti­ful land­scape and won­der­ful cit­ies, in secure and com­fort­able conditions. 

We have con­te­plated long about wheth­er to go to Ter­ceira or Sao Miguel, and I have to con­fess we decided on Ter­ceira because of bet­ter flight con­nec­tions, and a some­what cheap­er air­fare. Of course I have looked at sev­er­al pho­tos from Sao Miguel, the main island of the Azores, and based on these pho­tos I think there is more to see, and is prob­ably even more beau­ti­ful, than Ter­ceira. How­ever, we have nev­er regret­ted our decision: we had a won­der­ful time there, enchanted by the loc­a­tion and the tranquility.

How to get to Terceira?

The cheapest option to get from Bud­apest to Ter­ceira is to fly to Lis­bon or Porto with Wizz Air, and then catch­ing a Ryanair flight to the island from either Lis­bon or Porto. Ter­ceira is also served by both TAP Air Por­tugal and by SATA Azores Air­lines from Lis­bon directly.

There have been 2 art­icles on the Eden Azores blog about trav­el­ing to the Azores: one about the flight and stop­over options, and anoth­er one about how to get a free flight from SATA.

From the nearby Azores islands (for example Pico) you could take the ferry to Ter­ceira, but the ferry is slow and the sched­ule is pretty bad.

Ter­ceira

Our first main source of inform­a­tion about the island has been good old Wiki­pe­dia. The island which is smal­ler than Bud­apest is inhab­ited by approx­im­ately 56 000 people. Loc­als say they have at least this many cows on the island – which maybe is an over­state­ment – but you really do see cows every­where. There­fore, the island is full with beau­ti­ful green pas­tures fenced off with an incred­ible amount of vol­can­ic black rock. (For those who are sens­it­ive about flies and smells: don’t worry, we have not exper­i­enced that at all.)

The main city of the island is Angra do Her­oísmo, where most of the island’s pop­u­la­tion is loc­ated. The second biggest town is Praia da Vit­or­ia – which is closer to the air­port, but you barely notice the air traffic.

In terms of the weath­er, the sum­mer is pleas­antly mild, and we had a great time at the begin­ning in July, with only one rainy morn­ing on our last day. The tem­per­at­ure was between 20 – 25 degrees Celsi­us, but it feels of course very hot in the sun, and you can quickly get sunburnt.

The ocean tem­per­at­ure is rel­at­ively fresh in the sum­mer, but since there is not that much dif­fer­ence between air and water tem­per­at­ure, it doesn’t take much time to get used to the water. In winter tem­per­at­ures drop to as low as 10 degrees Celsi­us, and there is much more rain. Pub­lic safety is flaw­less, there are no bad neigh­bor­hoods, and almost no theft. You can get by with Eng­lish, even the eld­erly under­stand a few words.

Use­ful information

Once the travel arrange­ments have been made, comes the next ques­tion: acco­mod­a­tion. There aren’t too many hotels or hos­tels on Ter­ceira, there­fore it is recom­men­ded that you book very much in advance. We wanted to book acco­mod­a­tion 4 months pri­or to our jour­ney, and found way less options com­pared to book­ing 6 months in advance.

Luck­ily, Airb­nb did not let us down and we have found a great, 3 room, fully equipped apart­ment in the cen­ter of Praia da Vit­or­ia for a very reas­on­able price.

In case you would like to dis­cov­er the island without rent­ing a car, I def­in­itely recom­mend you use the two biggest cit­ies (Angra and Praia) as a base, because they have a pretty good con­nec­tion to the pub­lic trans­port sys­tem. But how­ever decent the pub­lic trans­port sys­tem is, it doesn’t get you to every sight, espe­cially not if you only have a few days at your disposal.

Driv­ing a rent­al car doesn’t mean too much stress, the traffic is very mild, the only place you might spend a few minutes in a traffic jam is Angra, and at times you will see cows cross­ing the road. The roads are in excel­lent con­di­tion, and not busy at all. There aren’t too many car rent­al com­pan­ies, so just like in case of acco­mod­a­tion it is recom­men­ded that you book early. What we have also real­ized when check­ing out car rent­al options, is that it can be quite expens­ive. How­ever, at least the com­pan­ies we check out offer air­port pickup & drop off.

Anoth­er thing that makes rent­ing a car a less desir­able option is that in both Angra and Praia you need to pay for parking.

In this Eden Azores post you can find out all about how to use the meters on the Azores.

Instead of rent­ing a car, you can take the bus – there are hourly bus rides between the two big­ger cit­ies, and the buses are clean and the fare is cheap (you can check out the bus fares here). Use­ful tip: wave to the driver to make sure he stops. By the way the bus drivers have been more than help­ful, for example open­ing the doors not only in the des­ig­nated bus stops, but wherever we asked them to. There are buses to most of the main sights depart­ing from Praia in every 2 – 4 hours. You can check out the bus sched­ule here.

We dis­covered the West­ern half and the insides of the island with a tour com­pany. I can highly recom­mend them! The com­pany con­sists of a won­der­fully kind and friendly mar­ried couple. It is the hus­band doing the tours for a small num­ber of people (a couple or a fam­ily). They know everything about the island, and tail­or all trips to the needs of their cus­tom­ers. They also take great pho­tos dur­ing these trips.

Gro­cer­ies cost almost the same as in Hun­gary, maybe just a tiny bit more expens­ive. Like every­where else, also in Ter­ceira the super­mar­kets are much cheap­er than the little stores. The dairy products and the wine is par­tic­u­larly nice.

Must eats include fish and sea­food, steak (from loc­ally sourced meat), and bur­gers since those are also made from the loc­ally sourced beef.

There is a recent post on the Eden Azores blog titled Gast­ro­nom­ic­al Buck­et List which fea­tures the Azorean steak (Bife a Region­al) and the most deli­cious Azorean sea­food (Lapas).

What to do

Apart from hik­ing and walk­ing (Angra and Praia are charm­ing cit­ies) there are a lot of sights, and events on the island.

Ter­ceira has a beau­ti­fulcave, which is a must see.

There are sev­er­al com­pan­ies offer­ing whale watch­ing and / or swim­ming with the dol­phins. We have opted for the lat­ter, and had a won­der­ful exper­i­ence. Unfor­tu­nately, the dol­phins did not stick around for long, but it was still unfor­get­table. We went with a com­pany called Ocean Emo­tion and were abso­lutely sat­is­fied. Our group of 8 has been led by a few young mar­ine bio­lo­gists. Use­ful tip: for those of you with a sens­it­ive stom­ach make sure to take a med­ic­a­tion to pre­vent sea­sick­ness (e.g. Benadryl).

Praia has a nice, long, and sandy beach, but also Angra is ideal for a nice beach day – and of course there are sev­er­al smal­ler coves, shorelines where you can take a dip. For us the high­lights were the “lava pools” of Biscoitos.

There is only one thing that can turn a beach day from good to bad: the Por­tuguese man of war (Physalia Physal­is) which is like a dan­ger­ous  jelly­fish (only that it is a colo­ni­al organ­ism, which con­sists of 4 dif­fer­ent kinds of polyps). We have seen them once dur­ing our hol­i­day (in Angra), where they drif­ted near shore due to the strong winds dur­ing the night before. Loc­als warned us to stay away, their sting is rather dangerous!

It is a sens­it­ive and divis­ive top­ic, and at first we felt bad to acknow­ledge that we found the run­ning of the bulls – Toura­das a Corda – inter­est­ing (and much less fright­en­ing and cruel than the bull­fight­ing we know from for example Spain).

Of course there is much more to see and do, these were only our high­lights. As a start­ing point I recom­mend you check out this page.

We can highly recom­mend Ter­ceira to every­one who likes tran­qu­lity, beau­ti­ful sights, and lovely locals.

Thank you so much Kitti for this exhaust­ive post about Ter­ceira, just by read­ing it I can ima­gine being there in per­son. I will be attend­ing the Wine in Azores in Ter­ceira and will be doing by utmost to provide you with even more information.

You can read about the best fest­ivals on the Azores – includ­ing Wine in Azores – in this Eden Azores post.

If you enjoyed Kitti’s post as much as I did, please write a review on Face­book or leave a com­ment here on the blog. We would love to hear what you think.

All pho­tos in the post were taken by Kitti. Thank you.