Telmo Mineiro, a fisherman from São Miguel, takes a heavy drag on his cigarette and points to where he found a brick of uncut cocaine on the shore. “We were hunting for sea urchins,” he says, “we saw the pack and went to get it out of curiosity.”

Mineiro, who was 13 at the time, had bunked off school with two friends. Together, they were scrambling over the black volcanic rocks that fringe the Atlantic island’s north-western coast. He spotted the package in a crevice, wrapped in dark-green plastic, and tore through its casing with his teeth. A trail of white powder streamed out. The boys, whose football pitch consisted of just two piles of pebbles as goalposts, were delighted. “We thought it was chalk,” says Mineiro, “we used it to mark out the lines around the goal.”

Many of the tales surrounding the events of 2001 in São Miguel, the largest of the Portuguese-owned Azores islands, have taken on fantastical twists – perhaps this one too. Another man told me that there was so much cocaine on the island that summer that teenagers were walking through the streets carrying shopping bags full of the powder.

Whether or not these accounts are entirely accurate, the unembellished truth is just as astonishing: in June 2001, hundreds of packages filled with extraordinarily pure cocaine washed up on São Miguel’s shores. People reported finding packets the size of hardback books bobbing in the shallow surf. Others were strewn on beaches, leaking their powdery contents into the sand.