Sao Miguel Island:Thu. Apr. 5

For our last day we decided to find the nearby Pineapple Plantation and the liqueur factory, and have lunch at Cavalo Branco (The White Horse) restaurant, which wasn’t open on our first day. The latter two were back on the north coast, just about 5 miles away up and over the island. We followed signs to the Pineapple Plantation, where we were given a sheet explaining what the different greenhouses were and how they are used in the process of growing pineapples. Sao Miguel is the only place in the world where they cultivate pineapples indoors and it was interesting to see. There was also a nice, but expensive, Gift Shop where none of us bought anything. From there we popped back over to Ribiera Grande and again followed signs that took us straight to the Mulhar do Capone liqueur factory. We walked in and were directed to the back, past enormous wooden kegs and the bottling and labeling rooms, to the tasting room. There was a large bus group being given a taste presentation in a Germanic language of some sort. But a woman invited us to the very front where a young woman with good English gave us our own chance to taste any of their 10 or so liqueurs and 2 brandies. They had sample size bottles of the liqueurs but not the brandies so we purchased a variety for gifts for the kids. (I don’t think any of our kids read this blog so this will still be a surprise gift for them!) From there we drove west along the north coast, retracing our route from Sunday, and returned to Cavalo Branco in Santa Barbara. Today it was open for our lunch and we were the first to be seated in the small space that slowly began to fill. One young man was the sole waiter and he did a good job. We all chose the house special, which was a tasting platter of fish, both boiled and roasted potatoes, bread stuffing, pineapple, chicken, beef, pork, and two kinds of sausage. It was a similar selection as the cozido meal from Furnas but prepared in a very different way and with different seasonings. Once again, it was more food than we could finish. With the rest of the afternoon stretching ahead of us we continued on around the west end of the island and drove the final bit of coastline that we hadn’t yet explored. When we returned to Ponta Delgada we parked near along the waterfront and walked both sides of the street along the water as the sun went down and the lights of the harbor came on. It was a nice way to say good-bye to our last evening on the island. We returned to the villa to enjoy bread, wine and cheese and then began to pack our things up to leave the next day.