Enchantingly remote: Golf in the Azores

For a golf trip with a difference, Kevin Markham visits the north Atlantic archipelago with a rich landscape of steep, mist-whipped mountains, verdant fields and hillsides found nowhere else on earth

Kevin Markham golf spread - Pedras do Mar Pool

THERE will always be special moments a golfer remembers. Long into their dotage such things cling to the memory, never letting go. For me, one of those moments will be Furnas Golf Club, in the Azores. We were met on the 1st tee by a mountain mist so heavy that it rolled along like tumbleweed. It followed us everywhere as we played beneath towering Japanese cedars, gifting us with occasional glimpses of green or fairway. And all the while wind swirled through the branches, the sounds devoured by the mist. It was surreal and unlike anything I had ever encountered.

Then again, the Azores as a whole are unlike anything I had ever encountered. Nine beautiful islands so alone in the Atlantic Ocean that it looks like someone high above had dropped a handful of diamonds by mistake. More accurately, they have risen from the sea floor through millennia of volcanic activity, creating a rich landscape of steep, mist-whipped mountains, verdant fields and hillsides, crater-lakes and flora and fauna found nowhere else on earth. You would need a week on every island and even that wouldn’t do this place justice. The size, the distance, the remoteness brings with it a peacefulness and pace of life that eases the foot off the accelerator.