The Atlantic Isn't Just Scenery

Hugo Gonçales sits at a café overlooking the harbour in Rabo de Peixe, the fishing village on São Miguel’s north coast that gave its name to the Netflix series that changed his life. It is early morning. The boats are out. The café smells of bica and salt air.

“This is where it all started,” he says, gesturing toward the harbour wall where a handful of older men are mending nets. “Not the writing — the seeing. Learning to see what was always here.”

A Village on Screen

Rabo de Peixe premiered on Netflix in late 2023 and quickly became one of the platform’s most-watched Portuguese-language series. Set in the 1990s, it tells the story of a group of young fishermen drawn into drug trafficking as their traditional livelihood collapses. The series was praised for its unflinching portrait of economic desperation and its stunning cinematography of the Azorean coast.

For Gonçales, the show was both a homecoming and a reckoning.

“I grew up here. These are the stories I heard as a child — whispered, never spoken aloud. The drugs, the money, the boats that came in at night. Everyone knew. Nobody talked about it.”

He spent two years researching the series, conducting interviews with former fishermen, coastguard officers, and community leaders. The result is a show that feels less like a crime drama and more like an anthropological study of a community under pressure.

Writing the Atlantic

Gonçales studied screenwriting in Lisbon, where he felt the pull of a different kind of storytelling — one rooted not in metropolitan concerns but in the particular rhythms and silences of island life.

“In Lisbon, everyone is in a hurry. Stories move fast. But in the Azores, time works differently. The weather changes every fifteen minutes. You learn to wait. That patience — that’s what I try to put into the writing.”

His scripts are notable for their use of landscape as character. In Rabo de Peixe, the ocean is never merely backdrop. It is employer, escape route, graveyard, and mirror — reflecting the ambitions and fears of the characters who depend on it.

“The Atlantic isn’t just scenery,” he says, leaning forward. “It’s a force that shapes how people think, how they relate to each other, how they understand time. If you don’t understand the ocean, you can’t understand these people.”

What Comes Next

Gonçales is now developing a second series, this time set on the island of Flores, the westernmost point of Europe. He is reluctant to share details but hints at a story that spans generations — a family saga shaped by emigration, isolation, and the volcanic instability that is both the Azores’ curse and its defining beauty.

“The Azores have a thousand stories that haven’t been told yet,” he says. “I could write for the rest of my life and barely scratch the surface.”

The boats are returning to the harbour now. Gonçales watches them with the quiet attention of someone who has learned that the best stories don’t announce themselves — they arrive, like the tide, on their own schedule.