The Real-Life Hooded Women of Blue Island

Not long ago, women still cloaked themselves under a peculiar costume in the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores

Portuguese women from the Azores wearing the traditional “capote” and “capelo” garments around 1930 | This photo is in the public domain | Image colorized by the author

There was a time when Azorean women doing their daily errands moved like shadows buried deep under thick woolen cloaks and hoods in the mist-shrouded villages of the mid-Atlantic archipelago.

The people from Blue Island called the two-piece costume capote and capelo. This is their story.

Last year, in October, I got my first real-life impression of how women wore this peculiar costume when I spent a week on Faial, one of the nine islands that comprise the Azores.

Until then, those hooded figures were only vague characters roaming the pages of a book I had loved since childhood: an impressionistic travelogue about the Azores penned by Portuguese novelist Raul Brandão and a great example of the travel literature genre.

Thinking about those hooded women wrapped in dark cloaks, my thoughts flowed from the evocative pages of Brandão’s ² to the ominous fictional dystopia portrayed by Margaret Atwood’s and the “modesty costume” worn by the Gilead characters in .³