Caldeira Velha Tickets: The Two Tickets, Every Price And The Time Blocks

• Booking runs on the regional government's own bilheteira at parquesnaturais.azores.gov.pt/bilheteira/caldeiravelha. That is the official seller of Caldeira Velha tickets and the only one this guide tracks. Choose your band, pick your 1h30 block and pay online.
• One warning about old links. The parks network used to live on parquesdaazores.com, and that domain is dead, so any deep link from an older article or blog 404s. The live official domain is parquesnaturais.azores.gov.pt.
• Reseller clones have grown around the name Caldeira Velha, and some charge well above the official bands. If a site is not the regional government's bilheteira, treat the price with suspicion. For what a visit actually involves, read the visit guide.
• One price discipline keeps this page honest: where the official horarios page prints a band, this page prints the same band in dollars, and where it prints nothing, the guide prints nothing. Search results around the name carry reseller pages with their own service fees and bundled upsells, so a reader comparing a third-party figure against the table above should expect the difference to be a middleman, not a price change. The visit guide keeps the on-site experience separate from the money.

The published block list

Each e-ticket is valid for 1h30 inside its booked block. Blocks start from 09:00 when the site opens. The table below is the published mid and high season list.

The winter change

Winter hours switch on 1 November, when the site closes at 17:00 instead of 18:30 or 20:30. The block list itself compresses to fit, so re-check the booking page for the exact winter blocks before you commit. Book early blocks in high season, because the pools cap at 100 bathers per block window and the site at 250.

• The monument is open every day of the week, including holidays, with three seasonal schedules published on the official horarios page.

• The carrying capacity is 100 visitors in the thermal pools and 250 visitors on site at any one time. That is why the timed e-ticket system exists. What sells out is the block calendar, not a physical queue at the gate.
• The bathing area is the quatro poças termais, four thermal pools. The ticket tier names Azul and Castanho do not exist on the current official site, so ignore any page that sells you one. The 1h30 clock on your ticket is the stay rule, and no extension is published. No towel rule and no swim-cap rule are stated on the official pages at all, and no pool-by-pool temperature is published.
• Read the two caps together with the block clock and the calendar makes sense: 100 bathers per pool area with blocks of 1h30 means the booking system, not a queue at the gate, is the rationing device. When the pools are full the site can still hold 250 total visitors, so the look-only Bilhete Visita usually keeps selling after the bathing bands are gone for a block. The visit guide covers what the water is like once you are in.

• Locker rental costs $2.29 (€2.00) and it is the only facility price published for Caldeira Velha. Towels are simply not mentioned on the official pages, so bring your own rather than expect a rental desk.
• Children up to 12 must be accompanied by an adult, which applies across the monument. Under-6s enter free on the bathing band, so a young family pays for the adults only.
• The honest summary for packing: the parks pages publish one facility price, the locker, and nothing else, so a visitor arrives with their own towel, their own cap if they want one, and no expectation of a towel desk. That is a finding rather than an oversight, and the same silence covers showers and changing rooms, where this guide prints no claims either way.

• Azores residents enter free on the first ticket each day, on both the Completo and the Visita bands. The proof is the Cartão de Cidadão, the Portuguese citizen card. That card is the rule, so a foreign ID is not worth claiming as a substitute, and staff at the bilheteira check it.

• During the official Vulcão do Fogo shuttle season, the Caldeira Velha entrance becomes entrada mediante reserva prévia, prior reservation required, per the official shuttle page. The monument doubles as the north gateway to Lagoa do Fogo, with its 101-space free lot feeding the restricted road.
• The season ran 1 August to 30 September 2026, with an Easter 2027 return announced. The Fogo road rules follow the same calendar, so check both before driving. When the shuttle runs and Caldeira Velha blocks sell out, the free-trail alternative nearby is PRC29SMI Salto do Cabrito, which starts a 2 km walk from the Caldeira Velha stop.