The city swallowed by the Atlantic

The island of São Miguel, the largest in the Azores archipelago, was put in the foreground by the series fish tail, about how a shipwrecked drug dealer splashed its shores with more than half a ton of cocaine. São Miguel has also been at the center of tourist attention for several years, as a paradise setting of lakes, mountains and tropical vegetation in the middle of the Atlantic.

But for its inhabitants, life is not extravagant like a Netflix series, nor idyllic like for tourists, but rather more twisted and difficult to fight, always with the ocean as the main protagonist. In the same council house fish tail is the parish of As Calhetas, more hell than heaven. Punished for its beauty, it is one of the most depressed areas of Portugal and reflects the vulnerability that makes this country vulnerable, more dependent on the Atlantic than on Europe.

Black cliffs, made of peat and pumice, carve out the northern part of the island. Above them one can see how some estates, located on the precipice, end in split walls: the sea has swallowed the parts that are no longer visible. “Everything fell to the shore, even some parts of the streets, and several neighbors started to go to other apartments,” says the visitor. “When I come back every summer, I see progress,” he adds. There are huge detached rocks on the beaches, with the remains of what used to be on the surface.

Storms and other extreme phenomena are becoming more frequent: if before their intensity increased every hundred years, now it does so every twenty or thirty years, the newspaper said. Public.

As Calhetas is one of the most endangered points on the island, due to large occasional landslides, such as this year: «6. April at five in the morning I went to the window and saw that there was no wall and he did not dare to open the door anymore. A large part of the coast was missing. I woke up the girls, my husband and we left the house. We don’t think twice,” says Marina Pereira, resident and local council worker. “I have lived here for eight years and six years ago a piece of rock fell off. Some specialists came, they said not to worry. But now my house is threatened, I had to leave and live with my parents, with my daughters and my husband,” she says.

Road closed

In 2019, six meters of land fell into the void. We’ve been living with the alarms on ever since. Car transit is already prohibited. The cracked road is barely three meters away from the gap. Cracks are like scars in the church and municipal offices. From one end, it is observed how the wind and the sea broke through the cliff; that is, the rock is gone and the city practically hangs over the void.

In addition to erosion, another major problem is tourism, which seeks houses near the sea and makes it more expensive to relocate a part of the population who in any case cannot decide: “There are many elderly people in this area who refuse to leave because they have lived here all their lives. I only know about a young couple who left, with two girls, because their home is in high danger.”

The city’s hopes are riding on a maintenance project recently approved for 2.7 million euros, which consists of filling a separate part of the cliff with cement. “They have already said that the project has been created and that they need to award it, but nothing is known yet,” explains Pereira, alluding to the abandonment they have felt for a long time. In any case, there is a feeling that this is only a temporary solution. It is estimated that when the island was occupied four centuries ago, the current centimeter between the houses and the sea was almost 90 meters, reports Public. Progress is inevitable.