THE path starts where the dirt road ends — at the crest of the ragged spine that makes up the whole of São Jorge, one of the nine islands of the Azores. When the clouds lift, which happens now and then, the Atlantic Ocean appears some 2,000 feet below —a sheet of smooth, blue-gray glass. But just as often, you will commence your hike shrouded in a white mist.

Sometime in the last year or so someone put up a sign. Between it and what remains of a rough-hewn wooden milking shed, forsaken now for mobile machines, the path plunges between two rows of hydrangeas with bright blue flowers as plump as muskmelons, and the inevitable deposit that marks it as a regularly traveled cow path.

The Azores — and São Jorge particularly — are covered with these paths. They are called canadas or caminhos and they crisscross the rugged Azorean landscape, bisecting pastures and linking towns and villages. On São Jorge, they provide the only access — except by sea — to some of the island’s fajãs, seaside villages built on the flatlands created from the subsidence of the volcanic peaks.

In recent years, the authorities in the Azores, a semiautonomous region of Portugal in the Atlantic, have begun marking these paths, hoping to attract tourists willing to hike up and down the very edge of Europe. I have been coming to São Jorge since 1991, the year I married an émigré born on the island, and back then I would hear of some of these paths, like lore, from my wife’s relatives. Others we encountered simply by starting down a village road, which would ultimately devolve into a foot-trail and then descend into the verdant ravines that cleave the island.