Mayor Ana Brum says the municipality’s largest celebration continues to be “the affirmation of who we are,” linking the legacy of whaling generations to present-day investment, community life, and the future of Pico
There are festivals that fill streets, and there are festivals that hold memory. In Lajes do Pico, Whalers’ Week has become both. Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, the municipality’s largest annual celebration continues to gather faith, maritime heritage, music, popular culture, and a deep sense of belonging into one of Pico’s defining communal rituals.
During the formal commemorative session held at the Church of the Holy Trinity in Lajes do Pico, Mayor Ana Brum emphasized that Whalers’ Week is far more than a summer festival. It is, she argued, an expression of local identity and of the inheritance left by generations of men who made their lives at sea.
The place of the ceremony itself carried symbolic weight. “Whalers’ Week always begins within these walls,” Brum said. “It is not protocol. It is memory.”
That distinction reveals much of what the celebration means in Lajes do Pico. The festival is inseparable from the Feast of Our Lady of Lourdes and from the promise made by whalers in 1883. Faith and festivity, danger and gratitude, sea and shore have long belonged to the same cultural landscape. As Brum put it, “the Feast and the Week are connected: one does not exist without the other, because here joy and faith have always walked hand in hand.”
Forty years, she noted, represent more than continuity. They represent inheritance. “Forty years is a legacy,” she said, describing Whalers’ Week as “the affirmation of who we are,” inspired by the courage and determination of those who came before.
That legacy is visible not only in remembrance, but in the way the municipality seeks to connect heritage with present-day development. Brum used the occasion to highlight a series of investments already completed or underway across the municipality, including the Jardim do Penedo Negro, Praça de São Pedro, Jardim do Castelete, Casa dos Botes, Portinho, Primeira Casa do Pico, and the restoration of the Forte de Santa Catarina and the Whaling Factory.
“These are spaces we are returning to the population with dignity,” she said, stressing that the projects are not cosmetic interventions but investments in quality of life and community experience.
The mayor also announced the opening of the new Lajes do Pico Business Incubator, installed in the former Fiscal Guard building, presenting it as a concrete commitment to local entrepreneurship, younger generations, and those who wish “to create here, invest here, stay here.”
The same philosophy underlies plans for the future Municipal School of Music and Auditorium. Culture, in this vision, is not detached from development. It is part of the social infrastructure that helps a community retain talent, strengthen identity, and imagine a future without severing itself from its past.
Brum also addressed two issues she considers urgent for the municipality: the construction of the new Lajes do Pico Health Center and the rehabilitation of the regional road between Lajes and Piedade. On the health center, her message was particularly direct: what people will remember, she said, “are not announcements, but the works.” With the municipality having already ceded the land, she called for speed and concrete action, arguing that access to nearby healthcare is a necessity, not a luxury.
She made a similar appeal regarding road access to Ponta da Ilha, defending a structural solution capable of providing residents with safety conditions comparable to those available elsewhere on the island.
Yet, by the end of the address, the speech returned to where it had begun: to Whalers’ Week itself.
The 2026 program brings together whaleboat regattas, the maritime procession, philharmonic bands, fado, popular marches, folklore, and contemporary music. Its richness lies precisely in that coexistence of forms: old boats and new sounds, religious devotion and public celebration, inherited ritual and contemporary expression.
For Brum, however, none of those elements alone explains the festival’s enduring force. What truly distinguishes it, she said, is “the warmth of the people of this place and the joy that springs from our spirit of fellowship and communal sharing.”
That may be the deepest meaning of forty years of Whalers’ Week.
The whaling era itself belongs to history, but the values formed around it—courage, collective effort, risk, faith, endurance, and solidarity—have not disappeared. They remain embedded in the way Lajes do Pico remembers itself and projects itself forward.
A community does not honor its past merely by preserving objects or repeating ceremonies. It honors it when memory becomes a resource for the future.
And in Lajes do Pico, where generations once watched boats disappear into the Atlantic and waited for them to return, Whalers’ Week continues to do exactly that: to gather memory on the shore, give it music and procession, and send it forward into another generation.
Based on a story in Correio dos Açores-Natalino Viveiros, director. Photos from the Municipality of Lajes do Pico.