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In December of 2011 I attended a film residency in Sao Miguel, an island about a thousand miles off the coast of Portugal. Our goal was to film and study the landscape of a place called Sete Cidades. The group planning the trip didn't want us to know anything about the place we'd be filming during the residency and so, to be true to the plan, I didn't even Google it. I packed my bags, hopped onto a plane and headed out to the middle of the ocean. The other attendees and I loaded into cars in Ponta Delgada and traversed the island. We drove along the winding road and the landscape became wooded. Moss covered the trees and ground. Ferns grew out of the sides of old buildings. The air was thick and wet. We drove until we reached an overlook into Sete Cidades. The town sits in a volcanic crater beside two lakes, one blue, one green. From above the sight is so beautiful it's unearthly. Winding into the grassy emerald valley, a man in a horse-drawn wagon came careening down the road smiling, his wood wagon full of metal milk cans knocking against each other as he passed. A pack of tiny dogs ran happily behind him. A single white church rose up in the middle of the town, in front of it a nativity scene. Next door was a bar. Inside the bar men played dominoes. Mist clung to everything, our hair, our clothes, the houses, the dogs, the men. The sky was gypsum and the walls of the crater rose up in the distance. The next day I arranged to go out with dairy farmers to milk their cows. We met early the following day and it was dark, windy and raining when I hopped into an old 4x4 with four men, videocamera ready. The small cross dangling from the rearview mirror swung wildly as we bumped down a dirt road to a green field. A mobile milking shed and twenty cows awaited and five at a time the men hooked up the cows. The generator was loud, the milking machine was loud but the way the men moved in and out of their small herd of cows in the misty green morning was quiet, seamless. They finished and offered me some fresh milk right out of the big milk can and I drank it. It was warm, sweet. I asked for more and the men laughed at me and obliged. I spent the next ten days with them, communicating in gestures and poor Portuguese. I studied the landscape through their work, quietly watching through my lens as they moved in rhythm with the animals and land they tended. Once or twice I saw them stop their work to gaze at the rays of sun, shining through the mist.