Until the end of the 20th century the official curriculum delivered in the Azores was the same as in the Portuguese mainland. But in 2001 a regional curriculum for basic education started to emerge. In August 2011 a framework of reference for its implementation was published and sent to schools. Considering that Azorean policy makers have invoked insularism to justify the emergence of the regional curriculum, at the same time as they have asserted commitment to cosmopolitanism, and that such kind of justification is not so visible in other Atlantic archipelagos, I intend to address two research questions: (1) To what extent does insularism justify curriculum regionalisation? (2) What kinds of relationship between the local and the global does the Azorean curriculum suggest? The paper is based on a discussion of the results of an analysis of Azorean legislation on curriculum, which has been compared to Canary legislation in the specific context of the first research question. The analysis has (1) confirmed that invocation of insularism is much stronger in the Azores than in the Canary Islands and (2) disclosed five kinds of relationship between the local and the global in the Azorean curriculum: inclusion, specification, perspective, influence and comparison.