Raising itself in this island, High Tip with 2.352 ms is the highest mountain of Portugal and it confers a character to him totally different from the rest of the archipelago. Tip, also famous by its whaling tradition, is the second island in extension of the archipelago, covering a surface with about 448 m2 (46 km in length by 15 of wide). Tip is located in the South end of the central group and is to about 8 km of Faial, 15 km of São Jorge, 80 km of Graceful and 100 km of Terceira.
While the colossal High Tip and the plateau that surrounds it occupy the part most of the west of the island, another plateau, the Planalto gives Achada with several dozens of volcanic cones, several lakes, grass and forests, occupy the zone most of this and arrive in some points at heights superior to the 1.000 ms. The slopes of these high earth, extend towards the coast that in the case of this island very is escarped, with formation rocky of strange forms, being specially impressive those of the North zone with numerous caves, arcs, tunnels and fissures. One of the formation rocky more known is Arcs do Puppy, a great rock perforated with tunnels and grottos located in the bay of he himself name in the coast the northwest.
Tip is “more young” of the islands of the archipelago, its origin calculates in does only about 300.000 years which explains its thin layer of humus on the volcanic rock that was initiated by the first colonos in second half of Century XV when they began the culture of his earth. The conditions of culture were, then, extremely hard and the culture of the grapevine and fruit trees era and is the hardest work. Other witnesses of the past volcanic of the island - only in the last 500 years, Pico Volcano, she has entered eruption four times, the last one in 1718 - are numerous the fields of lava (calls mysteries by the islanders since for them the reason of its bad luck was a “mystery”) and black lava stones that are by all the island. In order to recover their precious land of culture, the islanders accumulated all these rocks in small called pyramids maraiças and that add character to the landscape of Tip.