Tour Guide, São Miguel Island, Portugal
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Bright, confident 24-year-old Jorge runs Holistika, which offers an intriguing mix of tours that meld, say, swimming with dolphins with mindfulness and yoga (full day from €60pp). He takes me to Sete Cidades, a spectacular caldera three miles across, complete with breeze-ruffled, human-free, jade-hued lake. In Jorge’s lively company, Sete Cidades had become a sacred space, a place of wonder.
São Miguel’s many calderas may look like they’ve come straight out of Lord of the Rings, but the last significant eruption was in 1957, when the Capelinhos volcano, on the western coast of Faial island, blew it's top. On the green drive from Sete Cidades, we passed by a romério of men in rough shawls and bright scarves bearing metal-tipped staffs and chanting prayers whilst pilgrimaging around the island’s many churches.