I have spent a career drawing lines on the sea. Flores is where the lines stop mattering. It is the westernmost point of Europe, if you're generous about what Europe is, and it looks like the last place anyone bothered to finish.
Waterfalls come off the cliffs straight into the ocean. Inland, there are lakes in craters with hydrangeas grown wild around them, blue and blue and blue. The population is about 3,500 and half of them are related to the man who drove me from the airport.
The pools at Poço da Alagoinha are the thing everyone photographs, and they're right to. But the moment I keep is a Tuesday evening in Fajã Grande, sitting on a wall with a beer, watching the sun go down into water with nothing on the other side of it for three thousand kilometres.
I drew that coastline once, from a survey ship, in 1996. I got it right, I think. I didn't get any of this.
