Sirens of the Azores
What is Real
The island is real. You can fly to São Miguel, drive the north coast road, and stand where this book stands.
The harbor
Porto de Santa Iria is there — closed, unmarked, the basalt at the waterline and the ruined walkway above it. There is a sign at the top of the road that says PROIBIDO. It is a real place and it is not maintained; go carefully, and not alone.
It is also older than it looks. The contract to cut the access into the cliff was signed on 20 May 1525, in the council house at Ribeira Grande. It was budgeted at 120,000 réis and overran past 200,000, and a later writer said the finished work "parece de Romanos", it looks Roman.
Wheat went out of it from the earliest colonial years, and oranges after that, a shipment left on 25 January 1862. Whaling began here in the second quarter of the eighteenth century and ran through the whole nineteenth. The two varadouros, the stone ramps they hauled the whales up are still visible.
Ships were lost off it: a Castilian vessel in January 1555, with seven survivors. A caravel arrived on 8 June 1664 carrying the image of the Santo Cristo Atado à Coluna. A French brigantine anchored on 22 January 1798.
In November 2025 the regional government awarded a contract of over €4.5 million to rehabilitate it. By the time the book is out it may not be closed any more.
The villa
The Golden Mermaid Villa is in Ribeirinha, at number 19 on Avenida Joaquim Maria Cabral. The author lives in it. Nine bedrooms, seven bathrooms, two floors above a half-basement, and nine commissioned portraits on the walls.
It was built in 1929. Its front has not changed since. Above the door a veranda runs the full width of the house on four fluted columns, and its balustrade is pierced with a repeating five-petal flower cast in cement and faced with basalt dust, from a mould we have not found used anywhere else on São Miguel.
Its windows are American: six panes over one, sliding on cords and iron weights hidden inside the frames. That pattern has no Portuguese vernacular tradition; the mechanism is American construction. It is what the islands call a casa da América, a house built by someone who went to America and came home.
And the avenue is named after a former owner of it.
The village
Ribeirinha means little river, so named, the chronicler Gaspar Frutuoso explained in the sixteenth century, because Ribeira Grande next door was bigger. Frutuoso found it "de boas e frescas águas, bem povoado", a place of good and fresh waters, well populated.
2,510 people at the 2021 census. One of the five parishes of the city of Ribeira Grande.
The parish church, dedicated to the Santíssimo Salvador do Mundo, was begun in 1826 and finished in 1861, thirty-five years of building by a parish of smallholders. A hermitage stood on the site before it, and in 1630 it sheltered hermits fleeing the eruption in the Vale das Furnas.
The philharmonic society was founded on 2 February 1877 by Padre José Lucindo da Graça. It still rehearses, and the date is cut into the front of its building.
There was a linen factory here, opened in 1923 "para rentabilizar os terrenos agrícolas" — to make the farmland pay — and it employed the women of the village. One of only two chicory works on the island stood here too. Both are gone; the building is still standing, behind a hoarding.
Every August the streets are carpeted for the procession — wood chips dyed a week ahead, flowers picked the same morning, swept away the day after. Most villages walk their route in a day. This one is too long, and takes two, on two different roads.
The traditions
The Holy Spirit festivals are real, and they are the thing the Azores kept when the mainland lost it. The cult began in Portugal — Queen Santa Isabel is credited with the first Império at Alenquer in the early fourteenth century — and was largely squeezed out on the continent under Counter-Reformation pressure.
The Azores run at least four hundred Holy Spirit festivals every year. Mainland Portugal has just over a hundred recorded across its entire documented history.
More than three hundred brotherhoods across the nine islands. Terceira has around seventy painted impérios. São Miguel has the most brotherhoods of any island, roughly a hundred, in a plainer form that does not photograph as well.
At each one, bread, meat and wine are given out "a ricos e pobres, moradores ou forasteiros" — to rich and poor, residents and strangers, without exception. On Pico alone that still means over twenty thousand meals in a season.
The people who left
This is the part of the book the diaspora will check first.
Around 150,000 Azoreans emigrated to the United States between 1850 and 1930, many of them from whaling crews out of New Bedford and Nantucket. Then the United States closed the door: the Immigration Act of 1924 cut Portugal's quota to 438 visas a year.
The population of the Azores rose through the 1930s, 40s and 50s because nobody could leave — from 231,543 in 1920 to an all-time peak of 327,476 in 1960.
Then it opened again. The Saturnia landed the first organised group of Portuguese labourers at Halifax on 13 May 1953. The Capelinhos eruption of 27 September 1957 buried farmland on Faial, and the Azorean Refugee Act of 2 September 1958 — co-sponsored by Senators John O. Pastore and John F. Kennedy, reopened the United States, first for 1,500 families and then for 2,000 more.
Between 1960 and 1981 the Azores lost 84,000 people. Twenty-six per cent, in twenty-one years.
Today there are around 202 Holy Spirit festivals a year in the United States and 87 in Canada. Fall River. New Bedford. The San Joaquin Valley. Toronto, which Azoreans call a décima ilha — the tenth island.
In Riberia Grande, they built the Museu da Emigrção Açoreana which highlight the emigration story of the Azores. On of the most informative museum on the island.
And every August, at the festa in this village, there is a Mass of thanksgiving for the emigrants.
The rest of it
Marco Furtado is a real person. The vigia above the harbor is real, and there is still nothing to sit on in it.
The history is real. The 1522 landslide that buried Vila Franca do Campo. The 1755 Lisbon earthquake and the tsunami that reached these islands. The 1618 corsair raid. The Capelinhos eruption of 1957–58. The whaling stations, the impérios, the Holy Ghost festivals, the filarmónicas. The transatlantic cables that come ashore at Lagoa.
The Feejee Mermaid was real — P. T. Barnum exhibited it in 1842, and it is exactly as ridiculous as the book says.
The tea at Gorreana is real, and the water really does turn it violet, though not, it seems, for everyone.
And the nine?
What the book says about the nine, you are free to weigh as you like. Everything around them, you can go and touch.
Where to go
The nine locations in the book are real places, all on São Miguel, all reachable by car in less than 90 minutes.
Place In the book
1. Porta do Diabo, Ginetes The 1444 arrival
2. Ilhéu de Vila Franca do Campo The 1522 landslide
3. Lagoa do Fogo Where the nine meet
4. Porto de Santa Iria, Ribeirinha Where the book happens
5. The four islets of Mosteiros The 1642 squadron
6. Sete Cidades The 1713 crossing
7. Rosto do Cão, São Roque The cables, and 1943
8. Furnas Where the nine heal
9. Ribeira dos Caldeirões, Achadinha The 1780 sketch
There is a tenth place in this book. It is not on this list and it will not be. The narrator declines to say where it is, and so do we. A reader who has been to the nine and paid attention may work it out.
Come and see. Bring a jacket you do not think you will need.