Andrea Moniz-DeSouza, who retires tomorrow as president of Casa dos Açores in Bermuda, faces an emotional end to “a 15-year era of volunteering to promote Portuguese-Azorean culture” on the island.

Ms Moniz-DeSouza, who is still serving as the Honorary Consul of Portugal in Bermuda, has watched the island come to embrace and celebrate its Azorean community while its members rallied to build its headquarters.

The charity House of the Azores of Bermuda launched in 2015, but the idea came to her ten years ago during her tenure as president of Vasco da Gama Club.

She recalled: “I was invited by the Azores Government to attend a world council of Houses of the Azores, something like an annual general meeting, when houses from around the world were sponsored to hold meetings and learn about each other.”

She came away “feeling there was something missing in our community”.

Funding the creation of the cultural centre took hard work and about $500,000.

Members of the community discovered the love of Bermudians and tourists for the malasada — the Portuguese fried doughnut — served at the fundraising bake sales that helped bring Bermuda’s Casa dos Açores to reality.

Ms Moniz-DeSouza, who is in the Azores for the summer, told The Royal Gazette: “I never realised how popular they were. When I was in Bermuda last week for Harbour Nights, working at our stall, tourists said everyone had told them to come and try them.”

The founder of the charity and mother of two looks at the Casa dos Açores, which opened its headquarters in Pembroke in 2020, as “my baby”.

The group started out meeting in a member’s garage, facing the tough prospect of finding anywhere affordable to rent as a base until a government-leased site became available.

Casa dos Açores was selected by the Government to take on the lease, but the building, formerly occupied by the Sea Cadets at Admiralty House, needed a total overhaul.

“The only things that stayed were the walls,” Ms Moniz-DeSouza said. “Everything is brand new.

“We have continued over the last few years fundraising during Covid, which was not an easy time.”

In November 2019, Bermuda’s Azorean community celebrated another landmark with a public holiday marking 170 years since the arrival on the island of the first group of Azorean immigrants.

Vasco Cordeiro, the president of the Azores regional government, not only visited to mark the occasion, but opened the new home of the House of the Azores charity ahead of the building’s roof-wetting ceremony in 2020 with David Burt.

Azoreans, long associated with agricultural labour followed by landscaping, were discriminated against and shunned by many in the community that had become their home.

Ms Moniz-DeSouza said: “I’ve really enjoyed what we have done. From a young child, I remember there was a stigma being Portuguese.

“Now we are at this stage where we have come so far, openly celebrating our culture and no longer afraid to do so like we were in the past.”

The pandemic devastated Bermuda’s workforce in 2020, with many Azoreans returning home on an emergency flight that Ms Moniz organised in her capacity as honorary consul.

It came with an unexpected blessing, she said.

“That flight was really the opening of a door for us, for the beginning of the direct flights that we have now.”

Bermuda welcomed its first of the direct summer flights with SATA Azores Airline from Ponta Delgada in June 2021.

Ms Moniz-DeSouza said: “It was amazing. There were people who went to the airport just to watch the flight land and stayed until it took off.

“It brought us closer to home.”

The pandemic also opened a door to remote working, enabling Ms Moniz-DeSouza to divide her time between Bermuda and the Azores.

New leadership for Casa dos Açores is to be chosen after she steps down this weekend after an “exciting and exhausting” tenure.

“I felt something was missing and, years later, I feel I have accomplished that,” she said.

“It’s alive, and I feel it’s time to move on and let someone else go forward with it. I am sure I will find some new adventure.”