Criação Velha and the Moinho do Frade

The parish south of the ferry town

Criação Velha is the parish immediately south of Madalena, and it belongs to the same municipality. Its parish council puts it 2.50 km from the municipal seat, close enough that the town and the vineyards blur into each other along the coast road. To the north it borders the parish of Madalena and to the south the parish of Candelária.

It was made a parish on 20 November 1799, but the council's own history says the settlement is far older than that. The name points the same way: a criação was grazing land, and velha means old.

The vineyards and the windmill

For a visitor, Criação Velha means one thing first. Its shore is one of the two areas usually named as the heart of the UNESCO vineyard landscape, the other being the Lajido at Santa Luzia on the north coast. Here the black basalt walls of the currais run in a tight grid from the sea inland, each small enclosure sheltering a few vines from the salt wind.

Standing among them is the Moinho do Frade, a windmill with a red cap and sails on a basalt base. Wikidata records it as a listed heritage monument under the name Moinho de vento da Canada do Monte. The parish council names it, together with the eighteenth-century parish church of Nossa Senhora das Dores, the chapel of Nossa Senhora do Rosário and the Império do Espírito Santo, as the parish's main heritage.

The windmill stands on the marked vineyard trail described in the hiking section. It reads completely differently on foot: from the road the currais are a stone field, and from inside them the scale of the hand labour is the point.

How it fits a trip

Criação Velha is the easiest piece of the vineyard landscape to reach without planning. It is next to the ferry town, so it works as a first walk on arrival day or as the half day before a crossing back to Faial. Pair it with a visit to Picowines on the other side of Madalena, and with the wine section for the adegas that take visits by appointment. The parish council also counts the Gruta das Torres lava tube among the parish's attractions, inland and uphill from the vineyards.

There is little here to base yourself in compared with Madalena itself. For the other end of the island see Lajes do Pico, Piedade and São Roque do Pico, and Pico's villages for the comparison.

What this page does not tell you

The parish council's own pages give two different areas for the parish. The figure above is the one its history page and Wikidata agree on. Trail length, waymarking codes and the windmill's opening arrangements have not been checked against a primary source, so they are absent rather than estimated.