Madeira Islands historical timeline

Madeira has no pre-colonial history: the islands were uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived.

Discovery and settlement

Reached in 1419 by Joao Goncalves Zarco and Tristao Vaz Teixeira, sailing for Prince Henry, and settled from 1425. It was the first territory of the Portuguese overseas expansion, and the practices developed here — captaincies, plantation agriculture, forced labour — became the template for Brazil and beyond. The settlers burned the forest to clear ground, a fire tradition says burned for years, and the name means wood.

Sugar

By the late fifteenth century Madeira was Europe’s main sugar supplier, worked by enslaved people from Africa and the Canaries and financed partly from Genoa and Flanders. The wealth paid for the Gothic and Manueline buildings in Funchal. Brazilian competition destroyed the industry within a century.

Wine

Vines replaced cane, and the island’s position on the Atlantic routes made Madeira wine the drink of the colonial world — the American Declaration of Independence was toasted in it.

British influence

Merchant houses, two brief occupations during the Napoleonic wars, and a long run as a wintering resort for invalids and aristocrats.

Empress Sisi and the invalids

From the 1850s Madeira was prescribed as a cure for tuberculosis and other chest complaints, and a permanent colony of British and northern European convalescents grew up in the hills above Funchal, with churches, a cemetery, gardens and the hotels that served them. Empress Elisabeth of Austria wintered here twice, and the resulting villas and quintas are now some of the island’s better hotels.

Modern

Emigration through the twentieth century, autonomy within Portugal from 1976, and an economy now built on tourism.