MARRIED ON SÃO MIGUELMaria & Jonathan
Maria and Jonathan got married on São Miguel, the largest of the Azores, a green volcanic island out on its own in the middle of the Atlantic. It feels remote, but it barely is: direct flights land here from Boston, New York, Toronto and Montreal, as well as Lisbon, which is how most of the couples I meet out here arrive. It is, hands down, one of the best islands in the world to work as a wedding photographer. They handed me their wedding day to spend on it, and I did not waste a minute: crater rims, sea cliffs, a garden, a waterfall, and a sunset that took its time.
São Miguel
You do not have to invent much on São Miguel. It is all steep green and black rock, hydrangeas gone wild along the roads, and weather that turns over every twenty minutes. Cloud, then sun, then a wall of mist off the sea, then sun again. You stop fighting it and start using it.
The viewpoints
São Miguel is stitched together by miradouros, the clifftop viewpoints where the island drops away under you. I took them from one to the next as the light came down, the two of them small on the edges, the Atlantic wide open behind.
The coast and the island
Between the viewpoints the island keeps going. Sea cliffs that fall hundreds of metres straight into the water and a green so bright it looks turned up, and then, five minutes down the road, the ordinary version: two old men outside a bar with their pipes going, cows walking themselves home down a lane, a blue church wall, a waterfall in the hills. I like both halves of it about the same.
The last light
A rainbow held over one of the viewpoints long enough for them to stand under it. Then the sun dropped behind the ridge, the crater went gold, and I walked Maria and Jonathan out along a thin green path into the last of the light.
Maria and Jonathan flew to the middle of the Atlantic to get married, and got the whole island in return. If you want more of these islands, there is Claudia and Deniz’s Azores wedding, and elopements with Silvia and Florin and Kasia and Kostek, in the journal already. And if you need a São Miguel wedding photographer, I would fly back for it in a heartbeat. That is not a figure of speech.
