The UNESCO vineyard landscape on Pico

What is actually protected

The listing does not protect a view. It protects a method: the practice of growing vines directly on lava, inside walls built from the same rock, on an island where nothing about the site favours agriculture.

Pico has almost no soil. What it has is basalt, cracked and porous, and a prevailing Atlantic wind carrying salt far enough inland to burn foliage. Vines will not survive that combination unaided. So the ground was cleared by hand, stone by stone, and the cleared stone was rebuilt into low walls forming a grid of small rectangular enclosures. Each enclosure, a curral, holds a handful of vines. The wall breaks the wind, traps daytime heat in the rock and releases it overnight, and raises the plant just enough above the salt.

Seen from the ground, the effect is a black stone lattice running from the shoreline inland, following no plan except the shape of the lava flow underneath it. That lattice is the thing on the list.

The grape

The vines inside the currais are dominated by Verdelho, along with Arinto and Terrantez. Historically, Pico wine travelled well beyond the Azores, and the island's wine economy is the reason the landscape exists at scale rather than as a few sheltered plots.

Phylloxera in the nineteenth century, and the emigration that followed, took much of the cultivated area out of use. A good deal of what you see today is wall that outlived the vine it was built for. Restoration is ongoing and visibly partial, which is worth knowing before you arrive expecting a manicured wine region: this is a landscape in recovery, not a finished one.

Where to walk it

Two areas are usually named as the heart of the inscribed landscape:

• Criação Velha, west of Madalena, reached from the coast road and best taken on foot. The marked trail through it is the single clearest way to understand what a curral is doing.
• Lajido de Santa Luzia, on the north coast near Santa Luzia, where the walls run right down to the sea and the interpretation centre explains the construction.

Both read completely differently on foot than from a car. From a road it is a stone field; inside it, the scale of the hand labour is the whole point.

See the wine section for producers and tasting, and things to do for what else is nearby.

What this page does not yet tell you

The exact boundaries of the core and buffer zones, the inscribed area in hectares, and the selection criteria have not been checked against the UNESCO nomination document. They are absent rather than approximated: a figure with no source is the one thing this site does not publish.