Ponta Delgada is the largest city on the Sao Miguel Island and the largest in the Azores archipelago.
It's located on the South Central part of the island a little to the west side of it. It's a Harbour city and situated along the coast on the Atlantic Ocean.
It was where we booked our hotel during our stay on Sao Miguel and where we ate dinner and had drinks each night during our three days there.
We didn't do any extensive exploration of the city because we spent most of our time touring other destinations on the island, but we walked around it each afternoon before dinner and then again after we ate, just to get a feel for it and check things out.
We mainly stuck to the downtown area where all of the plazas, shops, restaurants and churches were located - the old town basically.
Many of the narrow streets in that area were pedestrianized and lined with shops and restaurants.
They had intricately designed black and white Cobblestone pavers that added a lot of character to the area.
Each street seemed to have it's own pattern too, which made them all the more unique and interesting.
Someone told us that the week we were there was when the island had its annual religious celebrations and festivals, but we didn't really see anything going on when we were out and about.
Some of the streets had lights strung across them and one of the plazas had a large stage set up, but the lights were never turned on during any of our walk throughs.
Similarly, the Santuário do Senhor Santo Cristo dos Milagres (church) was covered in lights, but we never saw them lit up during our stay. I don't think that we walked by it when it was dark enough.
The Portas da Cidade (or city gate) is an iconic landmark of the city that was built back in the 18th century. There's nothing to do there but take a picture but it was worth laying eyes on it.
There is an old fort that was built in the 16th century located down by the harbor. It's open to the public for a small fee but we didn't have time to go in ourselves. The fort was built to protect the island from pirates which is pretty interesting to me. You don't hear much about pirates these days.
Speaking of which, on one of the days that we were at a look out on the island we overheard a tour guide telling a story about Sao Miguel being invaded by a small foreign military force or maybe pirates (the exact details are unknown to me - we were eavesdropping afterall).
Anyway, a small group of soldiers (or pirates) had landed on the Northern part of the island and were making their way up the steep banks and cliffs that line the shore. An old woman living in the area heard the comotion that the invaders were making and became concerned. She thought that they were pirates there to plunder the area.
The woman began throwing stones and boulders down the cliff on top of them, forcing the invaders to retreat back to their boats. So basically an old woman single handedly defended the island from invaders with stones and boulders.
I think the moral of the story is - never underestimate the power of an old woman.
On one of the clear nights we walked down by the harbour to check out the shipping boats and sail boats.
I imagine that a lot of the food and products have to be shipped in from the mainland. We could see large cranes loading and unloading the shipping containers on the larger vessels.
One night we headed to a restaurant that was located outside of the main downtown area. It was where a lot of residential homes were located.
We noticed that a lot of the homes looked abandoned and dilapidated there and also that many others were undergoing some pretty significant renovations.
It made me think that the area was sort of an up and coming part of town.
Perhaps new tourism money was coming in and people were buying up cheap property to build homes and Airbnb's close to the city center.
I'm just speculating here but it definitely had that vibe of wealth spreading out from the central core in an increasingly larger radius. I always like the grungy look of run down homes though. They are often more interesting to take photos of then newer style homes. What do you think?
Overall we really liked Ponta Delgada. It was clean and felt safe and was large enough to stay interesting during our short three night stay there. By the third night we definitely felt like we had seen most of what there was to see in the old town and our nightly walks began to feel a little repetitive. For me it wasn't like some of the larger European cities that we had been to where you could spend a week there and feel like you still hadn't seen everything. Nonetheless, it did make for a great basecamp to explore the island during our stay.
