Landscape of the Pico Island Vineyard Culture

On the volcanic island of Pico in the Azores, generations of islanders raised a vast, intricate web of black basalt walls to wrest vineyards from bare lava fields swept by wind and sea spray. The landscape consists of thousands of small, contiguous rectangular plots — the currais — bounded by low dry-stone walls that run inland in long parallel lines from the rocky shore, sheltering the vines within from salt and gale. Begun in the 15th century, this remarkable feat of adaptation is manifest not only in the fields themselves but in the wine cellars, distilleries, churches, ports, tide-fed wells and 19th-century manor houses that grew up around the trade. The best-preserved remnant of a once far more widespread practice, the site is an extraordinarily beautiful testament to human ingenuity in a harsh environment. The Landscape of the Pico Island Vineyard Culture was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2004.