The greatest threat to paradise rarely arrives all at once. It comes quietly, almost imperceptibly, one additional visitor at a time, one more trail worn into fragile earth, one more parking lot filled beyond capacity, one more landscape admired until it begins to disappear beneath the weight of admiration itself.
The Azores now find themselves at one of those defining moments that every successful destination eventually confronts: how to welcome the world without surrendering the very qualities that made the world want to come.
In that context, the position recently advanced by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry of Angra do Heroísmo deserves careful consideration. Its proposal is neither a call to limit tourism indiscriminately nor an expression of hostility toward visitors. Rather, it is an appeal for something far more fundamental: knowledge before policy, data before improvisation, and planning before crisis.
The Regional Government’s decision to begin monitoring visitor flows on the island of Corvo is an important first step. Corvo, the smallest and most environmentally sensitive island of the archipelago, provides an ideal laboratory in which to understand how visitor numbers interact with accommodation capacity, transportation systems, natural attractions, public infrastructure, and the everyday lives of residents. Collecting objective information about arrivals, movement patterns, and visitor pressure on iconic locations such as the Caldeirão and the island’s walking trails represents precisely the kind of evidence-based approach that sustainable tourism requires.
Yet the Chamber is correct in arguing that the exercise should not end there.
The Azores cannot be understood through the experience of a single island.
Each island possesses its own geography, carrying capacity, infrastructure, economy, and cultural rhythm. São Miguel experiences realities vastly different from those of Corvo. Terceira faces challenges unlike those of Pico or Flores. Some islands continue searching for greater international visibility and improved air access, while others increasingly confront the delicate balance between popularity and preservation. A regional tourism strategy therefore demands regional knowledge.
Only through continuous monitoring across all nine islands can policymakers identify where visitor pressure is becoming excessive, where infrastructure requires reinforcement, and where untapped opportunities still exist. Such information would allow tourism to be distributed more intelligently throughout the archipelago, strengthening less-visited destinations while protecting those already approaching their ecological or social limits.
This is not simply an environmental question. It is also an economic one.
The long-term competitiveness of the Azores depends less on attracting the largest possible number of visitors than on preserving the authenticity that distinguishes the islands from increasingly standardized destinations elsewhere. Travelers who choose the Azores are rarely seeking crowded beaches or mass tourism. They come searching for silence, volcanic landscapes, biodiversity, authentic communities, and the rare privilege of experiencing nature that still feels genuinely wild.
Those qualities constitute the Region’s greatest competitive advantage. Once diminished, they cannot easily be recreated.
For that reason, the Chamber’s renewed proposal for a sustainability levy also deserves renewed debate. Such measures inevitably provoke disagreement, but if designed transparently and applied exclusively to environmental conservation, infrastructure improvements, visitor management, and destination enhancement, they can become investments in the very future of tourism itself rather than merely another fiscal burden.
Equally important is the Chamber’s insistence that sustainability should never become synonymous with restricting tourism.
Preservation and promotion are not opposing objectives. The islands that continue to receive fewer visitors—Terceira among them—still require stronger international promotion, improved air connectivity, and targeted marketing capable of presenting each island according to its own identity rather than treating the Azores as a single homogeneous destination. One of the archipelago’s greatest strengths is precisely its diversity. Every island tells a different story, offers a different landscape, preserves different traditions, and deserves to be discovered on its own terms.
Sustainable tourism therefore begins with understanding difference.
Perhaps that is the deeper lesson behind the Corvo initiative. Good tourism policy is not measured by how many visitors arrive this summer, but by whether future generations will inherit islands that remain as beautiful, authentic, and welcoming as those we know today. Monitoring visitor flows is not about counting tourists. It is about measuring responsibility.
For in the end, the true success of the Azores will never be defined by the number of people who come to admire its extraordinary landscapes, but by the wisdom with which the Region ensures that those landscapes remain extraordinary for centuries yet to come.
Based on a story in Diário Insular-José Lourenço-director-Photo From Municiplity of Angra, Sanjoaninas, 2026, Photographer António Araújo.