Madeira

Madeira has one of the most extraordinary walking networks in the world, and most visitors only scratch the surface of it. The levadas, narrow irrigation channels built centuries ago to carry water from the wet north of the island to the drier south, double as walking paths, threading through laurisilva cloud forest, along cliff faces, and into valleys that feel genuinely untouched. There are over 2,000 kilometres of them. You will not run out.

The range is wider than most people realise. Some levadas are flat, easy, and suitable for anyone willing to put on a pair of trainers. Others require head torches, a head for heights, and a willingness to shuffle along a ledge above a significant drop. The famous 25 Fontes and Risco walks give you dramatic waterfalls with relatively modest effort. The Vereda do Areeiro, connecting two of the island’s highest peaks, is something else entirely, and one of the finest mountain walks in Portugal.

What we’d tell any first-timer: don’t let the word “levada” mislead you into thinking it’s all gentle canal-side strolling. Pick your walk according to your actual fitness level, check the weather on the north coast before you go, and give yourself more time than you think you need. The island rewards walkers who slow down.

Madeiran food is honest, generous, and deeply underrated. It doesn’t chase trends or try to be something it isn’t, it feeds people well, uses what the island produces, and has been doing so for centuries. After more than ten years of eating our way around Funchal and beyond, we’ve developed strong opinions about what’s worth your time and what isn’t.

The non-negotiables: espada com banana, black scabbard fish with banana, which sounds wrong and tastes exactly right. Lapas grelhadas — grilled limpets with butter and garlic, eaten straight from the shell at a clifftop restaurant with the Atlantic below you. Bolo do caco, the local flatbread made with sweet potato, which appears at every meal and somehow never gets old. And poncha, the local sugarcane spirit mixed with honey and lemon, which is deceptively easy to drink.

On wine: Madeira wine is one of the great underappreciated bottles in the world. The fortified wines, Sercial, Verdelho, Bual, Malmsey, range from bone dry to richly sweet, and the good producers are extraordinary. Don’t leave without visiting at least one of the old wine lodges in Funchal. It costs almost nothing and the history alone is worth an hour of your time.

Let us be direct about this: if your idea of a beach is flat, sandy, and easy to reach, Madeira will require some adjustment. The island is volcanic, young in geological terms, and built for drama rather than comfort. What it offers instead is something we’ve come to prefer, sea pools carved from lava rock, natural swimming spots that require a bit of effort to reach, and a coastline that feels earned rather than packaged.

The lava pools at Porto Moniz on the northwest coast are the most famous, and rightly so, natural rock pools filled by the Atlantic, dramatic in any weather and genuinely beautiful on a calm day. Seixal, nearby, has a black sand beach that surprises people who weren’t expecting it. On the south coast, Calheta has an imported sand beach, artificial, but decent, and backed by good restaurants. For the adventurous, the natural pool at Garajau and the swimming platforms dotted along the southern coast offer something the beach resorts simply can’t.

Our honest advice: approach the swimming on Madeira’s own terms and it becomes one of the best parts of the trip. Go looking for Algarve and you’ll be disappointed. Go looking for something wilder, more interesting, and more memorable, and you’ll find it.

Madeira is a small island, roughly 57 kilometres long and 22 wide, but the roads make it feel considerably larger. The terrain is so dramatic, the tunnels so numerous, and the villages so tucked into folds of the mountain that you can drive for an hour and feel like you’ve crossed several different countries. We’ve been doing it for more than a decade and still find new corners.

The north coast road is the one we’d send any first-timer down first. Pull over at Seixal, walk down to the waterfall that falls directly onto the beach, carry on to São Vicente, and take the old road back over the mountains rather than the tunnel. It adds forty minutes and is worth every one of them. The east of the island, quieter, drier, less visited, has a completely different character: wide plateaus, old fishing villages, the strange lunar landscape around Ponta de São Lourenço at the very tip.

The villages are where Madeira’s real personality lives. Santana, with its traditional A-frame thatched houses. Câmara de Lobos, Churchill’s favourite painting spot, still full of fishing boats and old men. Curral das Freiras, the Valley of the Nuns, hidden so deep in a volcanic crater that you can’t see it until you’re almost inside it. None of these are off the beaten track exactly, but they reward anyone who stops long enough to actually look around rather than take a photograph and move on.

Madeira is sometimes called the Island of Flowers, and for once the marketing doesn’t oversell it. The combination of volcanic soil, high humidity, warm temperatures, and Atlantic light produces something genuinely extraordinary, a landscape where birds of paradise grow wild by the roadside, where jacaranda turns the streets of Funchal purple every spring, and where the laurisilva forest in the centre of the island is a UNESCO World Heritage Site that predates the last ice age.

The famous Flower Festival in spring transforms Funchal into something worth planning a trip around, the carpets of flowers laid through the streets, the children’s wall in the cathedral square built from blooms, the general sense that the whole city has decided to show off at once. But the flowers are not just a festival feature. They are present year-round, in the botanical gardens above Funchal, in the private quintas open to visitors, and simply growing out of every wall and verge across the island in a way that stops you mid-drive to look.

For anyone with a serious interest in subtropical plants, birds, or natural history, Madeira punches far above its size. The Madeiran firecrest, the Zino’s petrel, the laurel pigeon, the island has endemic species found nowhere else on earth. The nature here is not decorative. It is genuinely, quietly astonishing.

Funchal is the kind of city that rewards people who give it a proper chance. It’s easy to dismiss on first arrival, the cruise ship port, the tourist restaurants along the waterfront, the cable car queue , but push fifteen minutes in any direction and it becomes considerably more interesting.

The Mercado dos Lavradores is the place to start. Go in the morning, before the cruise passengers arrive, and it’s one of the finest covered markets in Portugal, exotic fruit you’ve never seen, fresh flowers banked against every wall, fishmongers with the espada laid out in rows. The old town has been gentrified but not ruined, the painted doors project that began as street art has become something genuinely worth wandering for. Monte, reached by cable car above the city, has the Tropical Garden and the famous wicker toboggan run, which is exactly as absurd and enjoyable as it sounds.

Our honest take, which we’ve already said on this page: Funchal is a base, not a destination. Use it well, eat at the restaurants in the old town, visit the Blandy’s wine lodge, walk up through Santa Maria Maior above the harbour for views that the guidebooks somehow keep missing and then get out into the island. That’s where Madeira really is.

Madeira has been quietly building one of the most compelling cases in Europe for working remotely and it’s not by accident. In 2022, the regional government launched an official Digital Nomad Village in Ponta do Sol, on the sunny south coast, making it one of the first places in the world to formally invest in attracting location-independent workers. The experiment worked. The island now has an established remote work community, and the infrastructure has followed.

For anyone working European hours, the timezone alone makes Madeira unusually practical. The island runs on WET, Western European Time, which puts it in line with Lisbon and just one hour behind Central Europe for most of the year. Your morning standup, your client calls, your team meetings, they all land at civilised hours. You’re not juggling a five-hour offset or starting your day at midnight. You’re just somewhere warmer, quieter, and considerably more interesting than your usual desk.

At the Santa Maria Home, we’ve made sure the practical side works. The house runs on gigabit fibre, not the patchy broadband that many holiday rentals quietly hope you won’t notice, but a genuine 1000 Mbit/s connection that handles video calls, large uploads, and whatever else your working day throws at it. The rooms are bright, the light is good for calls, and the pool is there for the moment you close the laptop.

Our honest take after more than ten years on the island: Madeira rewards the remote worker in a way that few places do. The mornings are productive because it’s calm. The afternoons are yours because the island is right outside the door. And unlike most sun-and-laptop destinations, it doesn’t get old, there’s always another levada, another village, another stretch of coast you haven’t seen yet.