Horta City

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Horta. Josse van Huerter settled here and built his manor house in the Porto Pim area. In fact, Horta probably perpetuates the name of its settler in a Portuguese form. Its first years were lived very peacefully and at the end of the 15th century it was raised to the status of a town. But this idyllic way of life was shattered in 1583 by the battle waged by Portuguese and Spaniards at the gates of Santa Cruz castle. Raids by privateers in the 16th century and political struggles led to the construction of fortifications which nevertheless did not prevent the Earl of Cumberland and his three ships from seizing a Spanish vessel and attacking and sacking the town in 1589. A few years later, in 1597, Sir Waiter Raleigh occupied Horta and burnt the main buildings after carrying out another terrible sack.
The Jesuits, who were then engaged in intensive activity in Brazil and the East, chose Horta as a resting place for their exhausted missionaries and built a large and splendid school there in the 17th century. In the following century the English explorer, Sir Thomas Cook, called at the town.
The struggles for the establishment of constitutionalism once again brought the town to the forefront of history with the support given to the liberals and the building of an arsenal. For this reason Horta was raised to the legal status of a city in 1833. Before that, however, an unequal battle was waged off Horta in 1814 between an American privateer and an English fleet, The American brig put up a brave fight but was finally run aground and burnt. The development of whale hunting brought whaling fleets to Horta during the whole 19th century. The whalers would take shelter at Porto Pim to rest their crews and recruit Azorean harpooners and rowers, famous for their courage and skill. In those days the streets of Horta were full of sailors who would break the peace of the night with their shouts and lively songs. The construction of a pier, started in 1876, attracted steamships which took on coal at Horta.
A new phase in the life of Faial began in 1893 with the laying of a submarine cable linking Horta to Lisbon and from there to the rest of the world. This was followed by other cables which transformed Horta into one of the main telegraphic communications centres of the first half of the 20th century. The first transatlantic flight stopped over at Horta in 1919, as did the majestic Pan American clippers from 1939 to 1945. A naval base in the two world wars, Horta was one of the ports used by the Allied fleet at the time of the invasion of Normandy in 1944.
One of the centres of the Regional Administration and the seat of the Azorean Parliament, Horta is a white town framed by the blue sea Yachts from all over the world are anchored there, the present reflection of its age-old vocation to serve as a cosmopolitan port where the paths of men of different races and languages meet, Places to visit: Parish Church of São Salvador; Church of São Francisco; Church of Nossa Senhora do Carmo; Church of Nossa Senhora das Angustias; Chapel of Nossa Senhora do Pilar; lmperio dos Nobres; Clock Tower; Santa Cruz Castle; Fortified Gate of Porto Pim; Walls of Sao Sebastiao; Historic centre; Museum of Sacred Art; Horta Museum; Monte da Guia.

The Dabney family. John Dabney arrived in Horta towards the end of 1808 with the mission of serving as the first consul in the Azores of the young republic of the United States of America. A far-sighted business man. he soon set up store houses that attracted ships to Horta to put on fresh provisions and repair rigging and hulls, Outstanding among these ships were the whalers that would stay there for a month to rest their crews and unload whale oil. John Dabney, and later his heirs, also engaged in the export of Pico wine (then very famous) and oranges; the latter were then an exotic fruit in the United States, and thousands of cases of them were sent there every year in specially chartered ships.
The destruction of the vineyards and orange orchards by blights in the second half of the l9th century resulted in a sharp drop in the volume of business which led the Dabney family to leave Horta and therefore the Azores in 1892. Traces of their stay in Horta can still be seen in the town houses FredÃ³nia and The Cedars and the charming villa called Bagatelle, as well as the former storehouses situated on the isthmus connecting Monte Oueimado and Monte Guia at Porto Pim.

Long Tom. In the battle between the American privateer "General Armstrong" and a British fleet in Horta bay in 1814, a cannon called Long Tom played a decisive role.
Made in France in 1786, it was part of the armament of the "Hoche", a vessel captured by the English during the Napoleonic wars. Sold to the United States, the cannon was set up on the poop of the "General Armstrong", and its destructive shots repeated the ships of the British fleet until the American brig was finally sunk.
Long Tom was recovered from the bottom of the harbour and after many years of service in Santa Cruz castle was granted to the United States in 1892. It is now on display at the Naval Arsenal in Washington.

The whalers and Moby Dick. The hulls were as black as coffins, The ships stank of oil and death. They were the hunters of the sea, the whalers. And every year they came to Porto Pim inlet to rest their crews and leave barrels of whale oil.
Horta was part of the odyssey of those rough men who would leave New Bedford to return years later, tired, sick and not always rich. Horta therefore appeared on the cyclorama painted on cloth that was displayed from town to town in the United States to show the life of the whalers, their ports of call and their hard toil.
In the spring and summer months, dozens of whalers would take shelter behind Mounts Queimado and Guia, All had Azorean crewmen, attracted by the risk and pay. They were appreciated for their resistance and courage, like the young Daniel who, in the famous book by Herman Melville, took part in the implacable chase of the great white whale, Moby Dick.

Horta and weather forecasting. Mentioned almost daily to justify the good and bad weather in the forecasts for Europe and North America, the Azores are a region in the middle of the Atlantic where changes in atmospheric pressure take place and influence the climatic conditions in a vast geographical area. The importance of this phenomenon was stressed by Prince Albert of Monaco during the several oceanographic expeditions he carried out in the archipelago in the second half of the l9th century. This led to the setting up in-the Azores of meteorological observatories, the first and most important being that at Monte das Moças in Horta, the observations of which were transmitted by submarine cable to Lisbon, London, Paris, Hamburg and Washington.

The telegraph cables. With the laying in 1893 of the first telegraph cable linking Horta to Carcavelos in Portugal, the first step was taken in a sequence that would make the town one of the largest telecommunications centres in the world in the first half of this century. The initial cable, laid with the prime purpose of transmitting the meteorological observations needed to forecast the weather in the Azores and its influence in Europe, was joined in 1900 by cables of German and American companies, and completed by further moorings in 1903 and 1904. After the 1st World War, new cables were laid in 1924,1925, 1926 and 1928. The 15 cables that linked Horta to the main capitals of the world required skilled personnel for their maintenance and operation as well as suitable technical facilities. A series of buildings that came to change the town's appearance were therefore constructed on the street named after Consul Dabney; they are a witness to the cosmopolitan atmosphere of that golden period in which people of various nationalities fraternised with the local population at festivals, sporting events and walks about the island. Testimonies to that period are the buildings of the German company, D. A. T. now occupied by government offices but retaining their original design (the outstanding feature being the ballroom with stained-glass windows) and the group of the American company, Western Union, which has been adapted to serve as a hotel. Technological developments expanded the capacity of telephone cables to transmit messages while there was greater use of the radio and later satellites. All this led to the gradual extinction of the companies that operated in Horta, the farewell ceremony of the last company having taken place at the end of 1969.

The odyssey of the seaplanes. Some of the most glorious hours in the history of the conquest of the air took place in Horta. Everything began in 1919, with the stop over at the town of the tiny and fragile NC4 seaplane piloted by the American, Albert C. Read, when he was making the first aerial crossing of the North Atlantic, with stops. Years later, other pilots Italians, Germans, Americans and Frenchmen chose Horta as a stopping point in their attempts, not always successful, to cross the Atlantic. In 1929 what was then the largest plane in the world - the Dornier DO-X, a 30 ton monster with 12 engines - set down at Horta, and in 1933 the same was true of part of Marshal Balbo's Italian squadron on the return legs of its Rome-Chicago-Rome flight. But it was with the visit of Charles Lindbergh, in the same year, that Horta entered the history of commercial aviation. On that reconnaissance flight for Pan American, the hero of the lone crossing of the Atlantic was able to verify the interest the town had as a stopping point for the future regular seaplane connections between Europe and America.
The first company to use Horta as a supporting base was Lufthansa, which carried out several flights using catapult ships. Imperial Airways (the predecessor of the present BA - British Airways) and Air France also carried out flights between 1937 and 1939.
With the introduction of the giant clippers by Pan American, Horta became the stopping point for the regular flights between Europe and America from 1939 to 1945.