Yesterday I did a post on some scening viewpoints on Porto Santo island. After we had seen these places, I wanted to find a cool cave that I had seen some photos of but it was located on a mountain in the middle of the island and no good directions on how to actually find it. This one is not the only cave mouth, there is one more that I saw before and wanted to get close to it. It wasn't as easy as it looked from afar...
Wo drove our quad bike halfway up the mountain where the path ended.
From there we had to carry on by foot. This is already where the confusion began. There were two not-so-clear pathways going in each direction, we just chose one without knowing where it actually goes. Cool view on the side tho.
You can see what the trail looked like. Looks more like a small animal trail or something. Quite steep, rocky, and full of cacti.
Soon we reached the point where there was no more trail and the terrain was even more steep, we pretty much had to climb on all fours now.
My girlfriend wasn't particularly happy and complained about where the hell did I bring her to 馃槄. I can't lie, it was pretty hard.
Finally, we reached pretty much to the top of the mountain. There was this really amazing view and how the mountain itself looked. Also, dangerous. One wrong move and you will fall down to the abyss on one side or a steep rocky cliff on the other. Glad we saw it still, it was one of a kind.
Our mission was to find a cave that we saw earlier and we were no closer to getting that mission accomplished. This mountaintop was dead and we weren't able to go anywhere from there, had to climb back the way we came, regularly checking out some good views.
We finally made our way to the other side of the mountain where the cave should have been. Well, should have been... but it wasn't. I was able to see the mountain top and up there, there was no cave. So obviously we were too high and the cave is lower but when we tried to go lower, there was a very steep dropoff which is not climbable for us and the detour would take us too long so we decided the plan to see this cave.
Instead, we found this another interesting subject to see near the top of the mountain. Some really cool-looking landforms on this mountain.
View to down below.
These are very old volcanic rock formations. These form when lava touches the water and cools rapidly. I wonder, how the water level was that high.
Photo of the top of the mountain. You can see my girlfriend in the photo too, good for the scale of the rock formation.
So I wanted to illustrate a bit where we were. Here is a photo I had taken earlier in the day when I saw the caves.
The GREEN line is where we hiked.
The ORANGE lines are where the dropoff was too steep for us to go to.
The BLUE line is where the caves are that we wanted to see.
The RED line is where we stood to see the cool place you see in the photos above.
Fortunately, those caves were not the main ones we wanted to see. There was another, very scenic one on the other side of the mountain.
We hiked all the way back to the quad bike and drove a couple of hundred meters to the other side of the mountain. There we found a small trail, that hopefully leads us to the cave eventually.
It was again, a bit of a struggle to know exactly where the cave is because the path disappeared soon, when we were higher up.
After a couple of minutes of being frustrated, we finally found it! When you look at it, it looks nothing special, just a random hole in the mountain wall.
The real reason why we were so eager to find it, was the view from the inside that overlooks all over the island. It was absolutely spectacular!
Having enjoyed some views with nich evening lighting, it was time to leave this mountain.
Those small ATV roads were also really fun to drive.
This post got quite lengthy, hope you made it to the end. It was a cool adventure on this mountain and definitely got to check out stuff worth seeing. More hikes on the island of Porto Santo coming soon!