Furnas

The smell hits you before anything else — that dense, mineral sulphur that catches in the back of the throat. I’d smelled something similar near Yellowstone once, but Furnas is more intimate. You’re walking through a valley that is quietly boiling, past bubbling mud pools and vents releasing columns of steam, and the effect is less dramatic than you’d expect and stranger than that. The landscape is perfectly green. Birds sit on rocks two metres from a fumarole. A family with a pushchair is photographing a mud pot. The ordinary and the geological are in total, unremarkable coexistence here.

The cozido is the thing I came for. Cozido das Furnas is a stew — beef, pork, various sausages, cabbage, potato, carrots, blood sausage — sealed in a ceramic pot and placed in a hole in the geothermal ground of Furnas to cook for six to eight hours. Several restaurants in the village pull their pots from the earth at lunchtime, and the whole business, when you watch it, looks less like cooking and more like archaeology. A man with gloves and a hook lever the lid off and this steam cloud erupts, carrying the smell of something ancient and deeply correct.

I ate at Tony’s, the oldest of the cozido restaurants, which has been pulling pots from the same ground since the 1930s. The room was full of Portuguese families from the mainland doing what I was doing — eating something cooked by a volcano. The stew was rich without being heavy, the vegetables soft but not disintegrated, the broth the colour of amber. I ate too much and had no regrets. The bread was dense local sourdough. There was local wine. It was one of those lunches that makes the afternoon impractical.

Furnas Lake sits at the end of the valley, and its margins are lined with more fumaroles — you can walk to the water’s edge and see the vents releasing steam directly into the lake, the water around them faintly warm and slightly sulphurous. Terra Nostra Park is nearby: a botanical garden surrounding a thermal pool the colour of tea, tinted by the iron and tannins in the water. Swimming in it stains your bathing suit orange. The thermal water is genuinely warm, genuinely odd, and genuinely wonderful.

The village of Furnas itself is small and slightly faded — a spa town that had grander ambitions in the nineteenth century, when Europeans came here to take the waters. Some of the old hotel facades survive, crumbling with a certain melancholy charm. On the main square there are kiosks selling thermal water in paper cups, hot from the ground, mineral-tasting and strange. I drank one. It tasted like drinking geography.

When to go: Year-round, though spring and autumn keep the valleys most atmospheric with mist. Book cozido lunch in advance — restaurants fill up by midday every day. Terra Nostra Park is most beautiful in spring when the tree ferns are at their most excessive.