Ribeira dos Caldeirões Natural Park - Maia Tobacco Museum - Vila Franca Islet
San Miguel 2025
Today was a busy day.
We started with the park in Ribeira dos Caldeiroes. It had a lot of good reviews.
We didn’t like it very much. Just a nice park with lots of tourists.
Park in Ribeira dos Caldeirões
Next, we go to the tobacco museum.
The museum is located on the grounds of a former tobacco factory, founded in 1871.
The factory ceased operations in 1988 and remained abandoned until 2009, when it was turned into a museum.
I liked the museum and how they tried to restore the factory and show all the stages of the process of turning tobacco leaves into cigarettes.
Serzhyk explains to me how to use a mallet :)
Tobacco was dried in two ways, depending on the type of tobacco and the result they wanted to achieve.
In both cases, the leaves were hung above the ceiling.
An open fire was lit in one room.
In this way, the tobacco dried faster, but had a smoky smell.
In another version, water was heated in pipes and the tobacco was dried thanks to the warm air heated by the pipes.
This took longer, but the tobacco had a milder flavor and no smoky smell.
Drying chamber with an open hearth
Drying chamber with pipes
Inside the factory, the old workstations have been restored, where women manually rolled and packed cigarettes.
Also preserved are the original semi-automatic packing machines, which eventually replaced human labor.
By the way, people worked at the factory for 12 hours — from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. And on Saturdays until noon...
It makes you wonder how people managed to survive with such a work schedule?
Packaging machines.
At such tables, women manually rolled cigarettes
A classic pack of factory cigarettes
***
After the factory, we head to the town of Vila Franca do Campo.
From there, we take a shuttle boat to Vila Franca Island.
There is half an hour until the boat departs, and we go for coffee and pastries.
We ordered carrot and pistachio pastries. They were very, very delicious.
Some of the best pastries I’ve eaten in the last.... many years.
I don’t know what was so special about them (definitely lots of spices, a bit of lemon, cinnamon), but the result was superb.
Very tasty pastries! Even though they look like an ordinary cupcake :)
And in this café, they also make traditional queijadas.
Through the large window, you can watch the packaging process.
Queijada pastries
And so, Vila Franca Island.
It’s a whole separate story. I really wanted to visit it.
This island is a small volcano, with crystal-clear ocean water in its crater and its own unique underwater world.
I really wanted to swim there. But this year they banned swimming there....
And what’s more, they even closed the main walking route, so, to be honest, there wasn’t much point in going there.
But I bought the tickets in advance and didn’t know about any of this. They didn’t want to refund the money for the tickets.
So we decided to just take a boat ride and see what we could....
After all, it’s not every day you get the chance to be inside a volcano crater, and in the ocean at that!
The town of Vila Franca do Campo, view from the boat on the way to the island
A path has been made around the crater. Before, you could climb to the top. But now the route is closed, and you can only walk here.
Vila Franca Volcano Crater. You really want to swim there, don’t you?
A whole bunch of crabs on the pebbles
On the way back, the boat passed between a rock that was once part of the island and the island itself — it was cool :)
