Santa Maria is one of the nine islands that comprise the Azores archipelago in the middle of the central/northern Atlantic Ocean. Together with Madeira, Canaries and Cape Verde, the Azores make up Macaronesia, which means “islands of the fortunate”. You can be one! Come to Santa Maria. The Azores islands sit on a very special tectonic setting, which is known worldwide as the Azores Triple Junction, because this is the place where three tectonic plates meet: Eurasia (Eu), North America (NA) and Africa (more correctly Nubia – Nu) (Marques et al., 2013; Marques et al., 2014). Santa Maria is basaltic and around 6 million years old above sea level, the oldest island in the Azores, and is the only island currently belonging to the African plate (Sibrant et al., 2015; Marques et al., 2020). All islands in the Azores are volcanic, but Santa Maria is very special because, contrary to the other 8 islands: (1) volcanism is extinct since around 2.8 million years (all other islands are volcanically active); (2) it comprises marine sediments with a wealth of marine fossils (so far not observed in other Azorean islands); (3) it has pillow lavas (submarine lavas) currently observed up to 200 m altitude inland (pillows have never been observed in the other eight islands); (4) the whole volcanic evolution is well exposed on the tall sea cliffs.