Where the Land Ends

Lisbon greeted us with heat and the smell of the ocean. We gave two days to this city on our way to the real destination — and didn't regret a single hour. We wandered the narrow streets of Alfama, stood on viewpoints where the whole city spreads out before you like an open hand, sampled bacalhau in all its endless variations and washed it down with port wine. And early in the morning, when Lisbon was still asleep, we queued up outside the ancient Jerónimos Monastery — for those famous pastéis de nata. It was here, within monastery walls, that the recipe was once invented, and since then this sweet affliction has spread across the world. But the original is the original: flaky, crisp pastry, hot custard with a caramel crust, and you stand in the morning sun and understand — the journey has begun in the right way.

But Lisbon was only the prologue. We could already feel the call of the Atlantic — of what lay beyond the horizon, beyond the edge of continental Europe, a thousand kilometres from the nearest mainland. The real story was waiting for us on the Azorean islands.

The plane landed on Faial — a tiny island in the middle of the ocean, the first of three on our route through the Azores archipelago. Faial is a place that for centuries served as a waypoint for sailors travelling from South America to Europe. Ships stopped here to refuel, make repairs, and wait out storms. This transitory fate left a particular mark on the island — in the local bar Peter Cafe Sport, the walls are covered with pennants from yachtsmen around the world, and you feel as though you are standing at a crossroads of oceanic routes.

The island itself is volcanic, and you feel it everywhere. Black basalt breaks through the greenery like bones through skin. We climbed the slopes to the craters, from where the views took your breath away: emerald hillsides plunging into the blue of the Atlantic, clouds drifting below you, and the feeling of standing at the very edge of the world. The air at altitude was damp and cool, smelling of earth and hydrangeas — they grow here along every road, blue and violet, as if someone had scattered paint across the entire island with a generous hand.

The following morning we went out to sea by boat to watch sperm whales. Swimming with them is prohibited, but the boat drew close enough to make out these giants in detail. A dark glistening back rises from the water, a blow of expelled breath, a few seconds of stillness — and then the enormous tail fluke slowly rises vertical before the animal descends into the depths. Each time a sperm whale dove, it left behind a perfectly glassy circle on the surface — its trace, its farewell. We watched in silence, and it seemed as though the ocean paused with us for a moment.

But the real thing began underwater.

The first dive was planned as a calm shore dive — to get acquainted with the local underwater landscape, nothing more. We weren't expecting anything special. And we were wrong. The volcanic terrain underwater turned out to be completely unlike anything I had seen before: no coral, but instead fantastical lava formations, arches, fissures, tunnels. And in this stone labyrinth, life was teeming. Shoals of fish appeared from nowhere — sweeping around a reef corner in a dense silver wall and dissolving just as instantly back into the blue. Triggerfish darted busily along the bottom. In every other crevice sat a moray eel, watching us with an unblinking gaze. Crustaceans twitched their antennae from beneath the rocks. What had promised to be a leisurely landscape swim turned into a full immersion in a living, breathing underwater world.

That was the warm-up. The aperitif before the main course. The following day, the open ocean awaited.

We set out on the catamaran early in the morning, when the sun was still hanging low and painting the water copper. About an hour and a half of motoring, the monotonous rocking on the swell — and then we stopped in the middle of the Atlantic. Beneath us: the abyss. No bottom, no reference points, only absolute blue in every direction. The crew lowered bait into the water, and we waited.

We didn't have to wait long. Fifteen minutes later the first shadow slid under the keel — a long dark silhouette, barely visible in the depths. Then a second. A third. Half an hour later, seven or eight blue sharks were circling around us, and the adrenaline was already pounding at the temples.

Lines with weights were strung beneath the boat — you grab hold of them and hang suspended in the water column, because there is nowhere to swim and no reason to. Beneath you: kilometres of ocean. A gentle current sways your body, and you try not to let go of the line, because drifting alone in the open ocean is a prospect, shall we say, for the adventurous. Nearby is the bait cage, and the sharks approach it — which means they approach you.

The blue shark is a creature of remarkable beauty. A long, slender body the colour of indigo, enormous black eyes. They moved around us unhurriedly, with a kind of languid grace, yet in every movement there was latent power. One came within arm's reach — I could see every detail: the matte skin, the gill slits pulsing rhythmically with each breath, the slightly parted mouth with its neat rows of teeth. It looked at me, and I looked at it, and in this exchange of glances there was no fear — only mutual curiosity between two creatures meeting on neutral ground.

But the culmination was waiting for us the next day. Princess Alice Bank — a legendary site, an underwater seamount in the middle of the Atlantic, one of the most famous dive spots in the world.

We left in the dark. For four hours the catamaran pressed out into the open ocean, and with each hour the coast of Faial faded behind the stern until it disappeared entirely. All around — only water and sky, and the thin line of the horizon dividing two shades of blue. The GPS showed the coordinates, the echo sounder confirmed — we were there. The anchor went down.

Forty metres. That was the depth of the seamount's summit — everything that rose toward the light from the oceanic abyss. Forty metres is a serious depth: limited bottom time, cold and pressure, a dive that leaves no room for error.

We descended along the anchor line. Hand over hand along the rope, metre by metre leaving the surface behind. The blue around us thickened, the light changed, the warm tones retreated, giving way to a cold blue-green dusk. The temperature dropped with every metre — at depth the water was noticeably colder, and the wetsuit no longer felt like such reliable protection. At thirty metres the nitrogen narcosis was already there — a mild euphoria, slightly slowed thoughts, the sensation that the world around had gently decelerated. And then, from out of the haze, the silhouette of the reef emerged — massive, magnificent, covered in life. We settled onto the plateau and spent every last minute we had been given absorbing what lay before our eyes. Time at that depth runs mercilessly fast: it felt like a minute had passed — yet the dive computer was already insisting it was time to ascend.

But the best was waiting on the ascent. We rose to fifteen metres and hung on the lines again — at a decompression stop, suspended in the heart of the ocean. And that was when they emerged from the blue.

Mobulas. An entire school — each one with a wingspan of a metre and a half. They moved through the water with weightless ease, beating their wings as though flying rather than swimming. Here at Alice Bank, whale sharks are sometimes encountered, but what we got were mobulas — and I don't regret a single second of it. They glided above us and below us, and there was something otherworldly about the sight: you hang in the blue void on a thin line, the abyss beneath you, and all around these impossible creatures that existed long before humans and will exist long after. Not everyone in our group managed to see them — some were distracted, some were looking the wrong way. I was lucky.

After Faial we crossed by ferry to the island of Pico — and felt as though we had entered another world entirely. Pico reminded me of the Galápagos Islands: the same primordial austerity, the same sense that nature here is more important than people. A small European town with a disproportionately large history. Neat houses with tiled roofs, cobbled lanes, small churches — everything miniature and toylike, as if someone had built a scale model of the ideal Portuguese village. But behind this pastoral quality lies a hard history. For centuries the island's main livelihood was sperm whale hunting, harvesting whale oil — and the traces of that era are visible everywhere: museums, old boats on the shore, harpoons on the walls, faded photographs of weathered bearded men beside the carcasses of slaughtered whales.

But Pico is also about wine. The island preserves a unique method of viticulture: the vines grow in tiny stone enclosures built from volcanic basalt, which protect the plants from the salty ocean wind. These vineyards are a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and when you stand among these black stone labyrinths with their green vines, you understand why. We tasted the local wine — tannic, with a mineral note, like the island itself — climbed the volcano, from whose summit the neighbouring islands are visible on a clear day, looked out at the world from above, at the lakes hidden in craters — and pressed on.

The last island was São Miguel — the capital of the Azores archipelago. After the intimate scale of Faial and Pico, it felt almost like a metropolis: restaurants, tourists, traffic. But the moment you drove out of town, the wild, untouched beauty returned. The famous twin lakes in the caldera of the Sete Cidades volcano — one blue, one green — lie in a deep valley ringed by forested slopes, and the sight is one of those that silences you. We bathed in the hot volcanic springs, where the water smelled of sulphur and warmed you to the bone, climbed ridgelines from which the entire island spread out below, wandered through tea plantations — the only ones in Europe. After the ocean depths and shark encounters, those days on São Miguel felt like a long, slow exhale, like surfacing — not only literally, but in every sense.

A few days later, tanned, smelling of ocean and neoprene, happy and exhausted, we boarded a plane and returned to Lisbon. At the airport our group split: some flew home, others decided to stay and continue exploring the Portuguese countryside. We embraced, promised to come back — as everyone promises who has been to the Azores.

And I know I will return. Because there are places that don't let go. Places where the land ends, and the world only begins.