Message #121263

[dhill757]

Urban Environment

Villages are the hubs of daily Azorean activity. Farmers work their
fields during the day and return to their village home in the evening.
Shops are plentiful. For example, in the 1880's, the city of Ponta
Delgada had 23 clothing stores, 6 apothecaries, 139 grocery or liquid
stores, 12 butcher shops, 8 ironsmiths, 15 bootmakers, and 8 tailors.
A hospital had 400 beds147. 

Mark Twain praised the Azoreans for their well-kept villages:
   
   Every street is handsomely paved . . . and the surface is neat and true as a
   floor . . . Everywhere are walls, walls, walls -- and all of them are tasteful
   and handsome -- eternally substantial . . . the town and the island are
   miracles of cleanliness.148

The dairymen lived in the villages but had to ride their horse or
donkey daily up to higher elevations to milk and care for their stock
as seen in this experience:

   I milked the cows every day while they were giving milk. We kept the cows
   in our pastures; which were five to seven miles from home. When they were
   five miles from home, I arose at three o'clock in the morning to get there
   at daybreak . . . I would milk the cows and return home with the milk about
   noon. I had lunch, rested for an hour, then went to work in the fields for the
   balance of the afternoon . . . In the Azores, the people own pieces of land that
   they have inherited. Sometimes the parents from whom they inherited lived
   far away, on the other side of the district, five, six, or seven miles from
   where the children lived. Each family, also, had, its own pasture for cows,
   sheep, or whatever else they possessed. This was the way it was with us.149