Lajes do Pico is a place of practical encounter in Philip Hoare’s account of whales: the Azorean town is associated with the people and organization who introduced him to sperm whales and helped make a licensed close encounter possible. Its significance rests less on a detailed portrait of the town than on its role as a point of access to the surrounding ocean and its wildlife.

Setting on Pico

Lajes do Pico belongs to the Azores, an archipelago scattered across the Atlantic about 1,500 miles east of Cape Cod and 1,000 miles from Lisbon. The islands are not merely dots on a map: they are the exposed summits of immense seamounts along an underwater ridge. Pico, the island named in Lajes do Pico, is geologically young, with an active volcano and recurring earthquakes. This setting places the town within a landscape shaped by volcanic change and oceanic distance.

An approach to sperm whales

In the book’s acknowledgments, Hoare credits Serge Viallelle with introducing him to sperm whales in the Azores and names Espaço Talassa, Lajes do Pico, João Quadresma, and Marco Avila among those who made the work there possible. The account also thanks Malcolm Clarke for discussing Physeter and its prey. Together, these acknowledgments locate the whale encounter within a network of local assistance and specialist knowledge, rather than presenting it as an isolated act of observation.

Hoare further thanks the Azorean government and the regional secretary for the environment for licensing his close encounter with Physeter macrocephalus. The detail makes clear that proximity to a whale was not simply a matter of reaching the water: the encounter depended on formal permission as well as on people who could guide and interpret it.

Place in the book

Lajes do Pico connects the book’s broad meditation on the ocean with a particular, human-scale encounter. The Azores are described as remote from familiar continental reference points, yet the work conducted there brings the whale into immediate view. The town’s importance is therefore both geographical and narrative: it marks where oceanic distance becomes a route toward direct attention to a living animal.