In today’s episode, I aim to answer a question burning deep inside somebody’s core.
Not mine. Also, presumably not yours. But somebody’s.
A question that frankly doesn’t even really matter.
But I’ve got a lot of b roll so let’s break it down anyway:
When you visit the town of Furnas in the Azores, is it authentic to eat their volcano stew?
I’d describe Sao Miguel kind of like a big fish in a small ocean.
It’s like the welterweight champ of the Atlantic. 6 foot something in a chain of 5’8.
However you wanna put it. Without even a hundred and fifty thousand people,
the population here is still larger than every other Azorean island combined.
That’s eight other islands. In fact, not a single one of them is even as big as the capital here.
But still, only a hundred fifty thousand people. That’s nothing. It’s a large town.
And what’s more, they’re kind of outnumbered.
This might be their land, but these days there’s more to the Azores than the Azoreans.
Long dead are the generations where the only outsiders are sailors stopping in at Faial for a drink at Peter’s Sport Café.
Nearly everyone these days comes by plane, and the best place to visit or not Sao Miguel is where the airport is.
So today the Azores host over 800,000 tourists a year. Statistically speaking,
which is the most fun type of speaking, seventy percent of those end up will spending
an average of three days here in Sao Miguel.
Which means, for those of you keeping score at home, that during high season tourists make up more than a tenth of the population.
Potentially even up to one in every five. Which brings me to Furnas.
Quite literally. That’s how I found this story. That’s how I got all this b roll.
I had the exact standard Sao Miguel three days, and I did the exact standard Sao Miguel things you’d do with them.
On day one, I drove to the canyon. It had a lookout point, and I looked out.
On day two, I wandered the city, I went scuba diving, that’s not important to the story.
What’s important is that on day three, like those infinite masses before me,
I found myself in the third most visited tourist destination on Sao Miguel: the town of Furnas.
Now Furnas, as the name implies, is on fire. Or at least it smells that way.
The entire town smells like a basset hound crawled under a quilt after eating egg salad. It is disgusting.
But I can see why the tourists come anyway because it definitely has its draws.
I mean hey, it’s a volcano. It has hot springs. That’s one of the main pillars of tourism.
Ancient romans took trips to hot springs. Ming emperors, Ottoman viziers, it’s upper class tradition almost everywhere on earth.
Hell, go to Japan today and you can even see our biological kin playing around in the bath.
I might not be a monkey spa biologist, but it seems pretty hard-wired to me.
Which isn’t to say the town started as a tourist destination. It didn't.
Its first people came for the trees not the springs. Lumber for their ships and towns.
It would been about surviving pirate raids. Cash crops. Cheese. Tourists didn’t even really exist.
The infrastructure simply wasn’t there yet. In those days people tended only to leave Europe to make money, not to spend it.
But a place like this on an island like this in a world like ours, you just know
there’s eventually going to be tourists. And for Furnas that eventually was 1875.
In the 1800’s, new ships and even newer ways of moving them meant people could interact with the world as never before.
And they took advantage. Poets could finally visit the places they’d seen in paintings.
Hunters could kill the animals that they’d seen in the zoo.
European domination had pried open the gates of the world, and by 1875,
ships no longer just contained their country’s hardest men. Tourists were now crossing the oceans.
With the Azores closer and cheaper than ever before, things began to change in Furnas.
A businessman bought an old Diplomat’s country home, turned it into a hotel,
and set about creating an entire industry.
It might have smelled weird, they might have talked a little weird, but that was just part of the experience.
It was nothing like the black smog of London, plus you could just walk upwind.
Word spread and from that moment forward, the town of Furnas would forever be on the map.
It remains one of the top destinations for the British to this day.
But an abyss never only stares one way.
In return for hosting all these guests, the locals would get more than just their money in return.
They’d also get to see themselves fetishized. They’d get see the minutiae of their culture analyzed and exoticized
by strangers aiming to consume it. It wasn’t really about them. They were just Portuguese.
Azorean. It was about their home. That's what made them special.
And yet, without them, without their attachment to it, it wouldn’t work. They made it authentic.
That’s what the tourists came for. That’s what they wanted to buy. And how do you sell that authenticity?
As I’m sure you can guess from the title, well, the answer was stew.
But not just any stew, Furnas stew. Volcano stew. Stew steeped in their culture. Brewed in the earth.
Cooked in the sands that their volcano keeps at a near-constant hundred degrees.
Direct from the Azorean slow cooker itself. You can’t get this anywhere else on earth.
It’s as authentic to Furnas as anything can be.
Which isn’t to say that the people of Furnas see it that way. Frankly, they never really did.
Probably because it was such a pain in the ass. Also it makes your stew taste worse.
That’s two pretty big strikes. But really though. Transportation, physical labour, risking your cookwear, leaving your house.
And you don’t really get anything in return.
If you’re from here, if this isn’t a novelty, so to speak, what’s the point?
It wasn’t like they were low on firewood, this is the wood town. And wood doesn't taste like sulfur.
So for those who did it, in this culture, the Azoreans, it was simply a way to show effort.
On rare days, festival days, Christmases that they wanted to set apart, a few families might make a volcano stew.
Not for the taste, not because of some cultural heritage that they were instilling in their children.
Just because it was cool. Use the volcano. It’s fun. It makes the meal special.
But the thing is, every day is like Christmas to a tourist.
It might not always be December but everyone visiting still feels like their moment is the special one.
And the money flows faster when you agree with them on that.
So fast forward a few generations and there’s more volcano stews being consumed on an average Tuesday in July
than in every local family’s Christmas past combined.
And it’s easy to present that as bad thing, but it isn’t like Furnas is mourning the loss.
What did they really lose? Authenticity? What does that even mean?
It isn’t like tourists eating the stew stops anyone else from making their own. They could do it any time.
It’s a standard Portuguese meal. There's nothing special about it. They just don’t. It’s a pain in the ass.
And plus, after selling it all day to tourists, it feels a bit different.
What Disney employee goes home and cooks a funnel cake? It’s hard to have your culture and eat it too.
The way I see it, authenticity is a bit like particle physics.
It doesn’t truly exist until someone observes it, and the moment they do it’s changed forever.
The more we stare into that bowl the more that stew stares back.
What does it really mean for a tourist to have an authentic meal if not eating something that wasn't made for them?
No true adventurer wants the stews that are cooked for them.
They want a small taste of what it feels like to be a part of the local community.
A community that they don’t belong to.
And in doing so, whether they are aware of it or not, they’ve created a community of their own.
It's just that in turn, they call that inauthentic.
Personally, I didn’t get the stew. Not because of some ideology.
Not because I think I’m above tourism. I just didn’t want it at the time.
Sulfur isn’t exactly my favourite spice.
But the thing is, honestly, now that I’m telling you about it, I kind of wish I did.
Because it really does define the experience of Furnas.
And maybe it’s no longer a thing for the locals, but it's still definitely a local thing.
So to answer my original question, in 2022, is it authentic to eat the volcanic stew of Sao Miguel?
I’d say yes. Absolutely.
It’s just, it’s even more authentic if you’re not even from there.
This is Rare Earth.