Madeira

Overview

Madeira is a volcanic island 800 km south-west of Lisbon, closer to Morocco than to Europe and sitting on the African plate, that Portugal claimed in 1419 and now runs as an autonomous region with its own government. It is 741 km² of mountain rising straight out of the Atlantic to 1,861 m at Pico Ruivo, with a quarter of a million people, half of them in Funchal on the sheltered south coast, and almost no flat ground anywhere.

What people come for is the walking. The levadas, irrigation channels cut along the contours of the mountains since the 15th century to carry water from the wet north to the dry south, have maintenance paths beside them that make level trails through cloud forest, past waterfalls and along cliff edges; the laurisilva, the laurel forest that once covered the whole island, is a World Heritage site. Around that are the things the island has always sold: a climate that stays mild all year, the fortified wine, gardens, the Cabo Girão cliff, the wicker toboggans of Monte, and a New Year firework display over Funchal bay that once held the world record.

There are no real beaches on Madeira itself; the sand is on Porto Santo, the small dry island 43 km to the north-east, two hours by ferry. Flights from Lisbon take an hour and a half, from London three and a half, and the island does a week easily: three or four days of walking, a day in Funchal, a day on the north coast, a day on Porto Santo.

History & character

An empty island

Nobody lived on Madeira when the Portuguese arrived. In 1418 two of Prince Henry’s captains, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, were blown off the African coast by a storm and sheltered at the island they named Porto Santo, “holy harbour”; the next year they landed on the big island at Machico, on 1 July 1419, and settlement began after 1420 with Zarco founding Funchal, named after the wild fennel growing there. It was the first territory found in the Age of Discovery, and it became the template for everything after: forest cleared, sugar cane planted, slaves brought in to work it, and by the second half of the 15th century the south coast from Machico west was one big sugar estate with Funchal as its mill town; by the 1490s the island had overtaken Cyprus as Europe’s source of sugar, financed by Genoese capital and shipped through Antwerp.

The cathedral, finished in 1514, is the one building from that first century still standing more or less as built. The water engineering started at the same time: the first levadas were cut in the 1460s, and the network kept growing until the 1960s.

Wine and the English

When sugar moved to Brazil, wine took over. Madeira lay on the route to the East Indies and the Americas, ships loaded it as ballast, and the island’s vintners began adding spirit to stop it spoiling; then someone noticed that a shipment which had crossed the tropics and come back unsold tasted better for the journey, and the heated, oxidised style that carries the island’s name was born. The trade left a colony of foreign merchants, the Reid’s hotel on its estate above the bay, the gardens on the hills, and a tradition of winter visitors from Britain that runs to the present day.

Autonomy and the airport

The modern island was made by two pieces of concrete: the airport, opened in 1964 with a runway so short that it was called Europe’s Kai Tak and finally extended in 2000 on to a platform of pillars over the sea, and the expressway that bored tunnels through the mountains and turned a day’s drive to the north coast into under an hour. The airport was renamed for Cristiano Ronaldo, the island’s most famous son, in 2017, with a bronze bust that became briefly more famous than the airport.

The result is an island that is more built-up, more prosperous and more efficient than its reputation as a retirees’ garden suggests, with a young crowd of walkers, trail runners and remote workers in Ponta do Sol alongside the cruise passengers.

See & do

The levadas

The levada walks are the point of the island. The maintenance paths run flat for kilometres along channels a metre wide, through tunnels, under waterfalls and along ledges with drops on one side, and the classic ones are the Levada das 25 Fontes in the Rabaçal valley in the west, which ends at a wall of springs, and the Levada do Caldeirão Verde above Santana in the north, through laurel forest to a waterfall in a green bowl. Neither is reachable by bus; tour companies run transport-only shuttles, and hiring a car is the alternative.

The peaks

Pico Ruivo, 1,861 m, is the top of the island and can only be reached on foot: an hour’s walk from the car park at Achada do Teixeira, or the longer ridge path from Pico do Areeiro, at 1,818 m the summit you can drive to, which crosses the spine of the island on stairways and through tunnels above the clouds. On a clear day both summits see Porto Santo and the Desertas.

Cliff, headland and coast

Cabo Girão, west of Funchal, is a sea cliff of about 580 m with a glass-floored skywalk on top, opened in 2012 and the highest of its kind in Europe, and terraced fields at the bottom that farmers reach by cable car. At the opposite end, Ponta de São Lourenço is the bare eastern tip, a nature reserve since 1982 with a walk out along a headland of red and ochre rock, seabird colonies and, if you are lucky, a monk seal. On the north-west corner, Porto Moniz has natural swimming pools in the lava, and the north coast road between it and Santana passes the thatched A-frame houses that are the island’s postcard.

Monte

Above Funchal, Monte is where the merchants built their summer villas, and it has three attractions in one: the cable car up from the seafront, 3.7 km and 560 m of climb in 15 minutes; the Monte Palace Tropical Garden, the grounds of a former hotel turned into a terraced garden; and the toboggans, wicker sledges on wooden runners that two men in white with straw boaters steer 2 km down the streets to Livramento, a ride that began in the 19th century as public transport.

On and under the water

Whale and dolphin boats leave Funchal marina daily, with sightings guaranteed to the extent that a blank trip earns a free second one. Surfers go to Jardim do Mar and Paul do Mar on the south-west coast, canyoners to the ravines of the north, divers to the reefs off the south coast. Porto Santo is the beach: nine kilometres of white sand along the south-west of an island that is otherwise dry and bare, with Columbus’s house in Vila Baleira, the main town.

Towns & cities

Funchal

Funchal is the sixth largest city in Portugal, 106,000 people on an amphitheatre of hills around a bay, and the country’s busiest cruise port. The old centre is small and flat: the cathedral, the Mercado dos Lavradores of 1940 with its azulejo facade and fish hall, the old town of restaurants east of it, and the seafront avenue where the cable car and the boats leave. Up the hill are the gardens, the Botanical Garden on the old Reid estate, opened in 1960, and the Monte gardens above it; west along the coast is the hotel zone, where most package visitors stay. It is not a nightlife city; the bars are quiet except on match nights, and the football teams are what the town gets loud about.

Câmara de Lobos and the south coast

Câmara de Lobos, the fishing town just west of Funchal, is where Zarco first landed in 1419 and named the bay for the monk seals he found in it; it is now a suburb with a fishing harbour and the road on to Cabo Girão. Further west, Ribeira Brava, Ponta do Sol and Calheta are the sunniest towns on the island, Calheta with one of the last working sugar-cane mills, which distils the spirit for poncha.

Machico and the east

Machico, 17 km east of Funchal and the third town of the island, is where the first landing and the first Mass took place in 1419 and where the first sugar was milled; it has the airport next door at Santa Cruz, and the road out to Caniçal and the São Lourenço headland.

The north

Santana is the north coast town, 7,700 people in a municipality of river valleys that gets 2,300 mm of rain a year at the Queimadas forest park and has the thatched houses and the Caldeirão Verde levada. São Vicente and Porto Moniz are the villages of the north-west, the latter with the lava pools and a base for the levadas of the Rabaçal plateau above.

Food & drink

The island dish is espada com banana: black scabbardfish, a deep-water species caught at 800 m and more that looks like a black eel with teeth, filleted, fried and served with a fried banana on top. The rest of the table is espetada, cubes of beef on a skewer, milho frito, cubes of fried polenta, and bolo do caco, a round flatbread baked on a basalt slab and served hot with garlic butter or as a sandwich. Bacalhau com natas is the other dish on every menu, and the fruit is the thing to buy at the market: bananas, passion fruit, custard apples, and the tropical hybrids the traders will let you taste.

Funchal has two Michelin-starred restaurants in the hotel zone and a great many places that serve the standard island menu competently and, in Wikivoyage’s words, not terribly excitingly; the better value is in the Zona Velha and out of town, where a plate of espetada with milho frito and a jug of wine is the whole evening.

Nature

The laurisilva is what makes Madeira different from any other Atlantic island. It is the laurel forest that covered the whole island before settlement, trees standing in near-permanent cloud on the north-facing slopes, cleared over centuries and now protected in what remains; UNESCO listed it in 1999, and the Madeira Natural Park, created in 1982, covers nearly two-thirds of the island to protect it. The forest is also the island’s water supply: it combs moisture out of the clouds, and the levadas carry it round the mountain to the vines and bananas of the south.

The birds include Zino’s petrel, one of the rarest seabirds in the world, which nests only on the central peaks. Ponta de São Lourenço and the Desertas are both Important Bird Areas for their seabird colonies. The Desertas, three barren islands 25 km south-east of Funchal, are a nature reserve for a colony of about forty Mediterranean monk seals, the animals that gave Câmara de Lobos its name; day boats go from Funchal.

The volcano that built the island is extinct, but the landscape it left is not stable: heavy rain on the built-up slopes above Funchal caused the mudslides of 2010 that killed and injured many in Monte and the city, and rockfall closes roads and paths every winter.

Climate

Madeira’s climate is the reason it has had winter visitors for two centuries. Average temperatures at sea level run between 15 and 20 °C across the year, and the island calls itself the land of eternal spring with some justification. The catch is that the island makes several climates at once: the south coast is sunny and dry, the north coast wet, and the mountains are in cloud more often than not, with the Queimadas forest at 860 m recording 2,300 mm of rain a year and November alone nearly 400 mm.

Rain falls mostly between October and March, sometimes in the torrential bursts that cause the landslips; summers are dry on the coast, and the climate changes from one valley to the next, which Wikipedia’s own entry for Machico calls complex.

When to go

Any month works, which is the island’s selling point, and the choice is about what you want to do. April to June and September to October are best for the levadas: the paths are dry, the waterfalls are still running, the flowers are out in spring and the cloud sits higher. July and August are warm, dry and full, with the Funchal hotels at their busiest.

Winter otherwise is cheap and mild, with hotel rates that can drop by a third in the low season; the mountains are wetter and some levadas close after storms, but the south coast is walkable in a shirt most days. Porto Santo’s beach season is June to September; outside it the ferry still runs but the island is very quiet.

Getting there

Everyone flies. Cristiano Ronaldo airport is at Santa Cruz, 13 km east of Funchal, the fourth busiest in Portugal and in some winter months busier than Faro, with several daily flights from Lisbon and Porto, direct services from London and most of northern Europe, and connections to the Azores and the Canaries. The runway, extended out over the sea on pillars in 2000, has a reputation for cross-wind landings and diversions, and it is worth a flexible plan on stormy days.

Getting around

The decision is whether to drive. The expressways, marked VE and VR, are fast, tunnelled and easy, and put Porto Moniz or Santana within an hour of Funchal; everything off them is narrow, steep and hairpinned, often with a cliff on one side, and Wikivoyage’s advice that a driver with less than complete confidence should leave it to the buses and taxis is fair. Parking in Funchal is hard; spaces marked M are for residents, so budget for the garages.

Buses go almost everywhere, slowly. Three companies divide the island: Horários do Funchal’s yellow buses in the city and up to Monte, Camacha, Santana and Curral das Freiras; Rodoeste to the west, including Ribeira Brava, Calheta and Porto Moniz; and SAM to the east, Machico, Caniçal and the airport. Timetables are hard to read and change on school days and holidays; buy tickets from the driver, tell them your destination, and expect the levada trailheads to be beyond the network.

Practical info

Madeira is Portugal and Schengen, with the euro, the same shop hours and the same 112 emergency number; police in Funchal wearing red armbands speak English or German, and crime is low. English is as common as on the mainland, and the local accent is strong enough that even Lisbon visitors notice it.

The hazards are the paths and the weather. Levadas run along ledges with no railings in places and through tunnels where a torch is essential; the mountain paths above 1,500 m are exposed to wind and cloud that arrive fast; and after heavy rain the island closes trails, which the regional nature institute, IFCN, announces online. Take water, layers, a head torch and proper shoes on every walk, and turn round if a path is taped off.

Accommodation is hotels in the Funchal zone, quintas in the hills, and a growing stock of rentals in the villages; low-season prices fall sharply and the weeks around Christmas and New Year are the exception in every category. The tourist office in central Funchal has the levada maps and the bus timetables that are otherwise hard to find.