Last year, after spending five days on the island of São Miguel, one of nine that make up the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores, I boarded my flight back to the U.S. with two distinct impressions. One: The beauty of this place was overwhelming and unlike anything I’d encountered elsewhere. Its rolling, almost neon-green hills; volcanic, black-stone cliffs; and winding roads that lead to seaside hot springs and the kinds of fishing villages you thought didn’t exist anymore lend themselves to descriptors like “Ireland-meets-Hawaii” and “the next Iceland,” clumsy comparisons that show just how hard it is to encapsulate all it has to offer.

Two: Being in the Azores can feel like you’ve been let in on a secret, a Golden Ticket to these mounds of land that rise improbably out of the Atlantic, 900 miles or a two-and-a-half-hour flight from Lisbon. On a two-hour bike ride around the rim of Sete Cidades, a giant volcanic crater, on a dirt path overlooking two shining lakes, my only encounter was with a pair of hikers who looked just as surprised to see me as I did them. I remember thinking how that sense of surprise was likely fleeting: I imagined the hiking trails clogged with tour groups led by headset-wearing guides in windbreakers. But still, over the course of my entire trip, crisscrossing the island in a tiny sedan, I only passed a single tour bus—and that, with a city-block-sized cruise ship in port. I was told that this, in large part, was because I was there in November, low season despite a year-round mild climate that hovers around 65 degrees Fahrenheit. High season, which spans the summer months, is different, said everyone I spoke to. High season is getting frighteningly busy.

And high season this year, which just wrapped up as summer ended, was kicked up a notch as Delta operated its first seasonal flights to the Azorean capital, Ponta Delgada, from JFK. It suddenly introduced a whole new option to American travelers who previously had to fly Azores Airlines on one of two year-round (from Boston and Toronto) and two seasonal routes (from Oakland and Montreal) catering to the Azorean diaspora. Between May 24 and September 3, Delta operated five flights a week from New York-JFK to Ponta Delgada. We asked Delta for data on how full those flights were, to no avail, but the fact that the airline will be doing the same route next year points to at least some level of success.