Madeira Islands Geography & Climate

Madeira is the top of an enormous shield volcano rising from a sea floor some four kilometres down, around 700 kilometres west of Morocco.

Vertical

The island is only about 57 kilometres long and 22 wide, yet reaches 1,862 metres at Pico Ruivo. The result is a landscape of extreme relief: ridges, ravines and sea cliffs, with Cabo Girao among the highest in Europe at around 580 metres. There is almost no flat ground, which is why the airport runway is built on pillars over the sea and why every village clings to a slope.

The levadas

Rain falls on the north and the high ground; the sunny south is dry. From the fifteenth century, channels were cut along the contours to carry water from one to the other — by hand, often by enslaved and indentured labour hung on ropes over cliffs, and later driven through tunnels. There are around 2,000 kilometres of them, still delivering irrigation water on a rota, and the maintenance paths beside them are now the island’s walking network.

Laurisilva

The north-facing slopes hold the world’s largest surviving laurel forest, a relict of the Tertiary vegetation of southern Europe, UNESCO-listed and covering around 15,000 hectares.

The archipelago

Porto Santo, flat, dry and sandy, 43 kilometres north-east; the uninhabited Desertas and Selvagens, both nature reserves.

The terraces

Almost every workable slope below about 800 metres is cut into poios — narrow level strips retained by dry basalt walls, some barely two metres wide, built by hand over five centuries. They hold the soil on gradients that would otherwise shed it, and the total length of wall on the island is not seriously estimable. Abandonment is now visible everywhere as terraces collapse back into scrub.

Volcanism

Dormant — the last eruption was several thousand years ago — but the rock, the caves at Sao Vicente and the black sand all show it plainly.

Madeira has one of the most equable climates anywhere, and several distinct ones within a few kilometres.

Temperature

Funchal averages 19°C in winter and 25°C in summer, with very little variation between months and nights rarely below 13°C. The sea runs 18 to 23°C. It is this steadiness — not heat — that made the island a wintering resort, and it is why it is sometimes marketed as the island of eternal spring.

North and south

The mountain spine splits the island in two. The north coast faces the prevailing north-easterly, catches the moisture and is green, cloudy and considerably wetter; the south is in rain shadow, sunnier and drier. Funchal receives around 640 millimetres a year while parts of the north and the high ground get two or three times that.

Altitude

Temperature falls rapidly with height, and the peaks can be near freezing with snow in winter while people swim in Funchal. Cloud frequently sits in a layer between about 600 and 1,500 metres, which means the summits are often in brilliant sun above a sea of cloud.

Rain

Mostly October to March, and mostly in the north and the interior.

Porto Santo

Much drier and sunnier, close to semi-arid, which is why it has the beach.

Cloud and the levadas

The laurel forest does more than catch rain: its leaves strip moisture directly out of the cloud that sits on the northern slopes, in quantities that add substantially to the water reaching the ground. The levada system depends on it, which is one reason the forest is protected as infrastructure as much as for its biodiversity.

Wind

The leste, a hot dry wind off the Sahara, occasionally brings dust and a sharp temperature spike.