Madeira Islands
Discover Madeira Islands
Introduction
Madeira is a volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic about a thousand kilometres south-west of Lisbon and closer to Africa than to Europe. The main island rises steeply out of very deep water to Pico Ruivo at 1,862 metres, which means the weather changes completely within a few kilometres: subtropical on the south coast, wet and green on the north, and often above the clouds in the middle.
The interior holds the laurisilva, a laurel forest that covered southern Europe in the Tertiary period and now survives here more completely than anywhere else; it is a UNESCO World Heritage site. It is walked on the levadas — some two and a half thousand kilometres of narrow irrigation channels cut across the mountainsides from the sixteenth century onwards to carry water from the wet north to the cultivated south, each with a maintenance path beside it. Those paths are now the best network of walking routes on any Atlantic island.
Funchal, the capital, sits in an amphitheatre of terraces above its harbour, with a cable car up to Monte and wicker toboggans that are steered back down the street by two men in white. Madeira wine is fortified and then deliberately heated, a technique discovered when barrels crossed the tropics as ballast. There are almost no beaches on the main island — those are on Porto Santo, an hour and a half away by ferry, which has nine kilometres of golden sand.