Pico Alto on Santa Maria: the summit, the forest loop and the 1989 memorial

Pico Alto is the top of Santa Maria, 587 m above the sea, and there are two ways to do it. Drive up, climb the steps to the summit and you have the view within half an hour. Walk the PRC02SMA loop from the same car park and you get two hours in the island's wettest, greenest corner, a second viewpoint over the west coast and the memorial to Portugal's worst air crash. If the hilltop is in cloud, the short visit is pointless and the walk is still worth doing.

Pico Alto rises in the middle of the island, in the municipality of Vila do Porto, and divides Santa Maria in two. From the summit the difference is plain: the western half, round Vila do Porto, is low, flat and ochre, while the east is hilly and wooded.

A road climbs to a car park just below the top. No bus goes up there, so you need a hire car or a taxi from Vila do Porto. From the car park, a stairway beside a military building takes you to the highest point in a few minutes.

The hills catch weather that the coast does not. Santa Maria is the driest and sunniest island of the nine, but the eastern uplands get much more rain, up to 1,800 mm a year in places, and Pico Alto can sit in fog while Praia Formosa is in sun. Look up at the hill from the coast before you drive. If its top is hidden, go walking first and come back later in the day.

On a clear day you see most of the island at once, the flat west and the green, broken east, and on the best days São Miguel shows on the horizon.

The summit is a plain hilltop next to a military building, not a landscaped miradouro. Come for the view, not for the setting.

The official short route PRC02SMA is a 6.2 km circuit, graded medium, which the Azores trails site times at two hours. It starts and ends at the Pico Alto car park. The official track runs between about 574 m and 336 m, so you lose roughly 240 m on the way out and climb it back on the return. The older printed leaflet gives 6.1 km; the trails site and the newer leaflets give 6.2 km.

The route, as the official leaflet describes it:

• Climb the stairs to the summit first, then return to the car park.
• Follow a dirt lane north through the forest. Much of it is planted Japanese cedar (Cryptomeria japonica), with native shrubs among them such as folhado (Viburnum treleasei) and uva-da-serra (Vaccinium cylindraceum), the Azorean blueberry. A gap in the trees looks down over the parish of Santa Bárbara.
• On a winding descent, a short signed detour to the left leads to the Miradouro da Caldeira, with a view over the island's west coast. It is the second-best view of the walk and worth the few extra minutes.
• Back on the main lane you reach the Casa do Guarda, the old forest guard's house, where the island's long-distance trail, the Grande Rota GR01SMA, crosses the loop. Turn south towards Alto Nascente.
• Climb back to the car park on a path once used by the workers who planted this forest. Near the end you pass the memorial to the 1989 air crash.

Where the loop shares the path with the Grande Rota, the waymarks are white, red and yellow; on its own it uses the yellow and red of a short route, and arrows mark each junction. Bicycles, motor vehicles and horses are not allowed on the trail. The leaflet asks you to tell someone which route you are walking and when you start, to stay on the path and to close any gate you open. In an emergency, call 112 and give the number of the last trail post you passed.

Fog can come down quickly on the hill. Wear proper walking shoes, carry a waterproof even on a sunny morning, and bring water and a hat. The official description, map, GPS track and any closure notice are on Azores Trails. Check it the day before you go.

Pico Alto is one of the 13 protected areas of the Santa Maria Natural Park, created in 2008. The Azores Geopark describes the massif as a biodiversity hotspot, with one of the island's important patches of laurissilva, the native evergreen forest of the Atlantic islands. Among its endemic plants are the Azores laurel (Laurus azorica), the Azores holly (Ilex azorica), pau-branco (Picconia azorica), folhado, uva-da-serra and the Azores heather (Erica azorica).

Along the loop the tall trees are mostly planted Japanese cedar, and the native plants grow as shrubs among and beside them, so look down as well as up. Leave everything where it grows.

On 8 February 1989, Independent Air Flight 1851, a Boeing 707 charter from Bergamo in Italy to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic, was descending towards Santa Maria for a scheduled stopover. It flew into Pico Alto, which was in cloud, at about 1,795 ft. All 144 people on board died: 137 passengers, all Italian, and seven American crew. It remains the deadliest air crash in Portugal. The board of inquiry found that the crew had descended to 2,000 ft when the minimum safe altitude was 3,000 ft, and listed a wrong pressure setting given by the controller among the contributing factors.

The memorial stands beside the trail on the last stretch back to the car park, with a plaque naming every victim. Relatives of the dead were still visiting the site 30 years on, and over the years walkers have gathered small fragments of the aircraft from the hillside and left them by the memorial. Take nothing away. This is a memorial to 144 people, not a viewpoint stop, so keep your voice down and leave no rubbish.

To see the memorial without the full loop, walk the circuit backwards from the car park: it is on the last stretch of the loop as the leaflet describes it, so it comes early the other way round.

Pico Alto sits on two longer routes. The PR06SMA Areia Branca, an 11.7 km linear trail of about four and a half hours, crosses the island from Praia Formosa on the south coast over Pico Alto to the Baía de São Lourenço in the north-east. The Grande Rota round the island crosses the loop at the Casa do Guarda. A taxi to the Pico Alto car park and the walk down to São Lourenço on the Areia Branca is the downhill half of that trail; you will need a pick-up at the bottom.

• Short visit: drive up on a clear day and climb the stairs to the summit. Allow half an hour.
• Half day: the full PRC02SMA loop with the Caldeira detour and the summit. Allow two and a half hours with stops.
• Full day: the loop in the morning, then down to the Baía de São Lourenço in the afternoon for a swim.

How high is Pico Alto? 587 m, according to the Azores Geopark. Some sources round it to 590 m. It is the highest point on Santa Maria.

Can you drive to the top of Pico Alto? You can drive to a car park just below it; a stairway beside a military building climbs the last few minutes to the summit. No bus goes up.

How long is the Pico Alto trail? The PRC02SMA is a 6.2 km circuit, graded medium, which takes about two hours. It starts and ends at the Pico Alto car park.

What happened on Pico Alto in 1989? On 8 February 1989 a Boeing 707 flying passengers from Bergamo to Punta Cana struck the hill on its approach to Santa Maria. All 144 people on board died. A memorial with their names stands beside the PRC02SMA trail, on its last stretch before the car park.