Estádio de São Miguel

Estádio de São Miguel – the Primeira Liga in the Atlantic

There is no second top-flight ground in Europe quite like this one. The Estádio de São Miguel stands on a volcanic island around 1,400 kilometres west of mainland Portugal, and every side that plays here has to fly. Some 13,000 seats, an open view across green slopes, the ocean at your back.

Santa Clara — the island's club

CD Santa Clara, founded in 1927 in Ponta Delgada and named after the district around the Santa Clara convent, are the only Azorean club to appear regularly in Portugal's top division. The colours are red and white, the island holds a little over 130,000 people — and the club carries all of them.

For a visitor that means no crush, no overfilled sectors, and a crowd that largely knows one another. It also means an opponent who flew in the day before, and it occasionally shows.

São Miguel: the green island

The largest of the Azores is the real reason for the trip. A Sunday fixture turns easily into a full week:

• Sete Cidades — two crater lakes side by side, one green, one blue, inside an extinct volcano.
• Furnas — hot springs and fumaroles; the Cozido das Furnas stew cooks for hours in volcanically heated ground.
• Gorreana — the oldest tea plantation in Europe, working since 1883 and open to visitors.
• Whale watching — sperm whales and dolphins pass offshore; boats leave from Ponta Delgada.

Getting there

João Paulo II airport sits on the western edge of Ponta Delgada, around four kilometres from the centre. From Lisbon the flight takes about two and a quarter hours, from Porto much the same; in the summer season several European cities are served direct.

The stadium stands on Rua Comandante Jaime de Sousa in the north of the town, a few minutes by taxi from the harbour and the old centre.

A word on the weather: these are mid-Atlantic islands, and conditions change faster here than almost anywhere. Pack a rain jacket even in summer — which is also why the pitch is one of the best in the country.