Corvo's history and legends: the stone horseman, the Carthaginian coins, the pirates and the 1832 tax petition

Corvo is a short visit for most people: a few hours, a walk round the crater and back on the boat. The village makes a lot more sense if you know a little of its story first. Why is there a bust of a 19th-century minister outside the town hall? Why does the patron saint have the title "of Miracles"? And why do people still talk about a statue known only from a 16th-century chronicle? This guide covers the legends, the history the municipality tells, and where on the island you can see it.

In his chronicle of Prince Dom João, published in 1567, the royal chronicler Damião de Góis wrote that the first Portuguese to reach the island found a stone statue of a man on horseback standing on a slab. The rider's right arm was stretched out with the index finger pointing west.

According to Góis, King Manuel I sent a draughtsman to make a drawing of it and then a man from Porto to bring it to Lisbon. It broke on the way. Only the heads of the horse and the rider, the rider's right arm, and a foot with part of a leg arrived in one piece.

Historians still disagree about it. Some point out that rock formations on the island can look like figures from a distance, and suggest the story grew from one of them. Others say Góis was a careful chronicler and his account should not be dismissed. Treat it as a legend with a respectable source rather than as a fact.

The second story is about money. In 1749, after a storm, a black pot of coins was said to have been washed out of the foundations of a building on Corvo. The only account of the find is a report that Johan Frans Podolyn, a Swede born in Portugal, published in Gothenburg in 1778. He said that in Madrid in 1761 the Spanish historian Enrique Flórez had given him nine of the coins: two gold and five bronze from Carthage, and two bronze from Cyrene in North Africa, all from about 200 BC.

If genuine, the coins would put Carthaginian sailors in the middle of the Atlantic more than 1,600 years before the Portuguese, which is hard to square with everything else we know: ancient geographers do not seem to have known the Azores, and archaeologists have found no trace of anyone on the islands before the 15th century. Some scholars find the coins as described consistent with genuine ones; others suspect a hoax, or coins left by a much later visitor.

The documented history starts around 1452, when the navigator Diogo de Teive sighted Corvo at about the same time as Flores. At first it drew few settlers, because it was so small. In the middle of the 16th century the captain-donatary Gonçalo de Sousa sent enslaved people from Cape Verde, most likely from the island of Santo Antão, to farm the land and raise cattle. Settlers from Flores followed around 1580, and Corvo had its own parish from 1674.

People lived from farming, fishing and livestock, and mostly for their own needs. The island was not as cut off as it looks on a map, though. Portuguese fleets used the waters around it as a meeting point, where ships coming from the empire waited for an escort back to Europe.

That traffic also attracted corsairs, and the late 16th and 17th centuries brought repeated raids. In 1632 Barbary pirates tried to land at Porto da Casa, the island's old landing place below the village, and were driven off. Local tradition says the islanders fought them with stones, and that the image of the patron saint turned the pirates' shots back at their own ships. From then on she was Our Lady of Miracles.

The first chapel, down by the sea, was destroyed by the pirates in 1632. The present church was rebuilt in 1795, and the date is still over the door. It burned in 1932, but the statue of the saint was saved: a Flemish figure from the 16th century that local tradition says was found at sea. Her feast on 15 August is still the biggest day of the island's year.

The raids may also have shaped the village. The old centre is a knot of narrow lanes between basalt walls, and the island's trail notes connect that layout with the pirate attacks of the 16th and 17th centuries.

For most of its history Corvo paid heavy dues to its feudal lord, in money and in wheat. In 1832, during the Liberal Wars, a group of islanders sailed to Terceira, where the Liberal government of Dom Pedro IV was organising its forces, and asked for relief. The minister José Xavier Mouzinho da Silveira was struck by how poor they were. By a decree of 14 May 1832 the cash taxes were abolished and the wheat payment cut by half. The same year the settlement was raised to a town, Vila do Corvo, and the island became a municipality, today the smallest in Portugal.

His will asked for his body to be buried in the cemetery of Corvo, "the smallest of the Azores". He died in Lisbon in 1849 and was in fact buried in Margem, in the municipality of Gavião, on the mainland. The island remembers him with a bust of basalt and marble in the town hall square, where the dark stone stands for the sea and the pale limestone for the land.

American whaling ships called at Flores to take on crew, and men from Corvo signed on as harpooners, with a name for courage. Whaling went on from Corvo itself until the middle of the 20th century, and a historic whaleboat is on show at Casa do Bote, the tourist office.

Between 1900 and 1980 the population fell from 808 to 370, mainly through emigration to the United States and Canada. In 2023 the island had 435 residents.

The airport opened in 1983, and in 1991 regular flights began to Flores, Faial and Terceira. Today the island lives mostly from cattle, and in 2007 UNESCO declared Corvo a Biosphere Reserve.

Everything is in or next to the village, and you can see it in a morning:

• Casa do Tempo, on Rua das Pedras, is the Ecomuseum's history centre and tells the island's story in order, from settlement to today. Its published summer hours (1 April to 30 September, as listed in 2026) are Monday to Friday, 10:00 to 12:30 and 13:30 to 17:30. Winter hours are not published, so ask at Casa do Bote.
• The Church of Our Lady of Miracles, with the 1795 date over the door and the statue the island credits with the 1632 escape.
• The Mouzinho da Silveira bust in the town hall square.
• Porto da Casa, the landing the pirates tried to take, now the island's harbour.
• Casa do Bote and its whaleboat, on Caminho dos Moinhos.

Our Vila do Corvo walk covers the route, the windmills and the other Ecomuseum houses. There is nothing to see of the stone horseman or the coins; both are known only from written accounts.

Is the statue of Corvo real? Nobody knows. The account comes from Damião de Góis's chronicle of 1567, which says it broke on the way to Lisbon. No piece of it is on show, and some historians think a rock formation started the story.

Were Carthaginian coins really found on Corvo? A report published in 1778 says so, describing a find made in 1749. There is no other evidence of anyone on the Azores before the Portuguese, and historians are divided.

Why is there a bust of Mouzinho da Silveira on Corvo? In 1832 he abolished the island's cash taxes, halved its wheat dues and made it a municipality. He asked in his will to be buried on Corvo, but he was buried on the mainland.

Where can I learn about Corvo's history on the island? At Casa do Tempo on Rua das Pedras, open on weekdays in summer (2026 hours: 10:00 to 12:30 and 13:30 to 17:30, 1 April to 30 September). Ask at Casa do Bote for winter opening.