Cooking and Swimming in Hot Springs

The sulpher smell is what hits you first. The clouds of steam rising from the ragged black cracks in the white-yellow crust, then the slightly-off-eggs smell wafting on the breeze. Then you wonder where the over-heated steam will break through next. Watch your step!

Our jolly rental-car crew has now arrived at Furnas. The area where they cook their famous "cozido das Furnas", underground slow-cooked stew, is beside the big warm-ish crater lake, Lagoa das Furnas. Today there's a special event here involving several restaurants. A big tent has been set up to accomodate the crowd eating sulpher-steamed stew, baccalão and meat-and-beans. You can also buy local bread, honey, brandy from stands along the edge of the tent. A stage is raised on one side for concerts in the evenings.
In the town of Furnas there are more underground "furnaces". A beautiful mid-town park smokes from fissures in the earth and is covered with lovely flowering bushes and trees, fountains and walkways. Draped in foggy steam. The steep, green pastures up the sides of the crater in the background.

There are five parks in this little town. We stop at the old estate garden, Parque Terra Nostra. It was created by an American, Thomas Hickling. He arrived in the Azores in 1769. Made his fortune in oranges. In front of the manor house is a big pool. With yellow-green water and a palm tree island in the middle. You can swim in the pool. So we did. It's bath-tub warm. But the outdoor shower, to remove the yellow sulphur-water, was c-c-cold.

Before returning to town we manage a tea plantation visit, too. At Gorreana Chá factory from the 1870's. Old copper machines and tea tasting of good black and green teas.