The QuietNature project brings psychology and neuroscience together to investigate an often-overlooked dimension of well-being in the Azores: not simply what a landscape looks like, but what it sounds like. Running through February 2029, the research will examine whether the restorative effects of nature are altered when birds, wind and open space coexist with traffic, aircraft, ports and other forms of human-generated noise.
We often imagine tranquility with our eyes. A green pasture descending toward the Atlantic, a crater lake surrounded by forest, hydrangeas along a country road, the immense blue silence of an Azorean horizon: these are images through which the archipelago has learned to describe itself to the world. But the human body does not experience landscape only through sight. It listens. And a place that appears peaceful may sound very different once an aircraft passes overhead, traffic moves along a nearby road or machinery enters what seemed, from a distance, to be an untouched rural scene.
That apparent contradiction lies at the heart of QuietNature, officially titled “Quiet Nature? The Impact of Noise Pollution in a Nature Destination.” Launched in March 2026 and scheduled to continue through February 2029, the project brings together psychology and neuroscience under the leadership of researcher Ana Catarina Macedo Mendonça. The Gaspar Frutuoso Foundation is the principal beneficiary, with the research connected to the University of the Azores’ Faculty of Social and Human Sciences and its Centre for Humanistic Studies. Its central question is deceptively simple: does being surrounded by nature necessarily mean being in an acoustic environment favorable to physical and psychological well-being?
QuietNature will use experimental and physiological approaches to investigate the restorative effects associated with immersion in natural environments and the potentially adverse consequences of noise. Importantly, the researchers will not reduce the question to a simple opposition between silent countryside and noisy city. Rural sounds will also be considered, as will the increasingly common “hybrid landscapes” in which natural and urbanized environments overlap. This is particularly relevant in the Azores, where roads, homes, tourism facilities, economic activities and recreational spaces often exist immediately beside pastures, coastlines, forests and other areas perceived as natural.
The distinction matters because the Azores are not automatically acoustically quiet simply because much of their territory remains rural or natural. Road traffic, airports, ports, industry and services all contribute to environmental noise. Regional authorities themselves recognize that noise pollution extends beyond inconvenience and can affect quality of life, well-being and public health. The archipelago has had a legal framework addressing noise since Regional Legislative Decree 23/2010/A, which established rules for preventing and controlling exposure, incorporated environmental noise considerations into territorial planning and provided for sensitive and mixed zones, noise maps, action plans and designated quiet areas.
QuietNature, however, proposes to move beyond mapping where noise exists toward understanding what noise does to the person experiencing a landscape. What happens physiologically and psychologically when the restorative qualities of nature encounter an unwanted acoustic intrusion? Does a beautiful natural setting continue to produce the same benefits when accompanied by persistent traffic? Are certain sounds perceived differently in rural and urban environments? And can the coexistence of nature and development be planned in ways that protect not only landscapes but also the experience of tranquility within them? The researchers hope their findings can eventually contribute to urban planning, ecological-transition strategies and nature-based tourism policies.
That final dimension may prove particularly significant for an archipelago whose international tourism identity is inseparable from nature. The Azores are promoted through volcanic landscapes, ocean experiences, trails, forests, lakes and an idea of escape from the intensity of metropolitan life. Yet tranquility is not exclusively visual. A visitor may stand before an extraordinary landscape and still experience it through engines, traffic or machinery. The quality of a destination’s natural heritage may therefore depend partly upon something tourism photography cannot capture: its soundscape.
There is a larger environmental lesson here as well. For decades, conservation taught us to protect what could be seen—the forest, the coastline, the lake, the bird, the whale, the geological formation. Increasingly, sustainability asks us to consider what surrounds those things: light, air, water and now sound. Protecting nature may also mean protecting the conditions in which human beings can encounter it.
Perhaps that is the quiet importance of QuietNature. It asks the Azores to listen to themselves.
Because silence is not necessarily the absence of sound. Sometimes it is wind moving through cryptomeria, water against volcanic stone, birds within a forest, or cattle somewhere beyond a pasture. And if nature possesses the power to restore something within us, understanding the sounds that preserve—or interrupt—that restoration may become another way of protecting both the islands and the people who inhabit them.
Based on a story in Diário dos Açores, Paulo Viveiros, director – The photo is also from DA.