Saturday 26 September 2015

Landscape of the Pico Island Vineyard Culture

The Pico Island is the place of the highest point of Portugal. Zé "Pombal", who sent me these two postcards, says that is a beautiful island, such as the other 8 islands of the Azores.

Vineyards in the Pico Island
The Landscape of the Pico Island Vineyard Culture is an outstanding example of the adaptation of farming practices to a remote and challenging environment. Pico Island is one of nine volcanic islands in the Azores Archipelago in the Atlantic Ocean. The island contains spectacular evidence of grape-growing and wine-making (viniculture), with an imposing pattern of orderly, long, linear walls running inland from, and parallel to, the rocky coastline around its northern and western edges. The stone walls form thousands of small, contiguous, rectangular plots built to protect crops from wind and salt spray. Vines were, and continue to be, planted within the small and soilless plots (locally called currais). 

Vineyards in the Pico Islands

The extensive system of small fields, as well as the buildings (manor houses, wine cellars, warehouses, conventional houses, and churches), pathways and wells, ports and ramps, were produced by generations of farmers enabling the production of wine. - in: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1117

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