Santa Cruz das Flores

Santa Cruz stands on the eastern shore of Flores, one of the westernmost islands of the Azores. The island was settled in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, after an earlier attempt to establish a community had failed. Santa Cruz grew into one of its principal settlements; a document of 1548 refers to it as a town, though the date at which that status was granted is unknown. Its inhabitants lived with the isolation of an island far out in the Atlantic.