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One fact often debated is the origin of the name "Azores" used to identify the archipelago. By 1492, in the globe of Martin Behaim, the eastern and central group of islands were referred to as Insulae Azore ("Islands of the Azores"), while the islands of western group were called the Insulae Flores ("Islands of Flowers").
Spain held the Azores under the Iberian Union from 1580 to 1642 (called the "Babylonian captivity" in the Azores). The Azores were the last part of the Portuguese Empire to resist Philip's reign over Portugal (Macau resisted any official recognition), until the defeat of forces loyal to the Prior of Crato with the Conquest of the Azores in 1583.
The Romans called it Mare Magnum ('Great Sea') or Mare Internum ('Internal Sea') and, starting with the Roman Empire, Mare Nostrum ('Our Sea'). The term Mare Mediterrāneum appears later: Solinus apparently used this in the 3rd century, but the earliest extant witness to it is in the 6th century, in Isidore of Seville .
(1) "that the Azores are volcanic islands and are not the remnants of a more or less large continental mass, for they are not composed of rocks seen on the continents"; (2) "that the tachylytes dredged up from the Atlantic to the north of the Azores were in all probability formed where they are now, at the bottom of the ocean"; and
Called não-meesqueças, or forget-me-nots, the purple flowers were considered extinct before a cluster of plants was discovered growing on Corvo, the Azores’ smallest island, in 2014. Despite ...
Because none of the Macaronesian islands were ever part of any continent, all of the native plants and animals reached the islands via long-distance dispersal. Laurel-leaved forests , called laurisilva , once covered most of the Azores, Madeira, and parts of the Canaries at an altitude of between 400 and 1,200 metres (1,300 and 3,900 ft), the ...
The 'rediscovery' of the Azores islands in 1427 is merely a reflection of the heightened strategic importance of the islands, now sitting on the return route from the western coast of Africa (sequentially called 'volta de Guiné' and 'volta da Mina'); and the references to the Sargasso Sea (also called at the time 'Mar da Baga'), to the west of ...
The Fortunate Isles or Isles of the Blessed [1] [2] (Ancient Greek: μακάρων νῆσοι, makarōn nēsoi) [3] were semi-legendary islands in the Atlantic Ocean, variously treated as a simple geographical location and as a winterless earthly paradise inhabited by the heroes of Greek mythology.