🇵🇹 Portugal · Atlantic Islands
Madeira is a green mountain planted in the middle of the Atlantic. Almost a thousand kilometres from Lisbon and closer to Africa than to Europe, this volcanic Portuguese island rises sheer from the sea, with dizzying cliffs, mist-wrapped peaks, waterfalls and a laurisilva forest so ancient and valuable that Unesco declared it a World Heritage Site. They call it 'the island of eternal spring' for its mild year-round climate, and it is one of the best-loved nature and hiking destinations in Europe.
Its capital, Funchal, is a friendly, flower-filled city that climbs the amphitheatre of mountains above the harbour. From there the cable car runs up to Monte, and from Monte come the famous wicker toboggans: sleds of wicker and wood pushed and braked by two 'carreiros' in rubber-soled boots, a 19th-century tradition that has become one of the most entertaining rides anywhere. But the soul of Madeira lies in its levadas, the centuries-old irrigation channels whose paths let you walk through forests, tunnels and precipices, and in the traverse between its highest peaks, with views that look like another planet.
One expectation to adjust: Madeira is not a classic beach destination. There is almost no sand — the coast is volcanic rock — and anyone after a long golden beach has to cross to neighbouring Porto Santo. What there is plenty of is something else: natural lava pools at Porto Moniz, the glass viewpoint at Cabo Girão over one of the highest cliffs in Europe, fishing villages such as Câmara de Lobos, the Madeira wine that seduced kings and the Founding Fathers of the United States, and an Atlantic calm that is hard to forget. This guide covers the essentials, with real prices and practical advice.
Madeira was uninhabited when the Portuguese navigators João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, in the service of Prince Henry the Navigator, officially 'discovered' it in 1419 (after sighting Porto Santo in 1418). Settlement began around 1425 and much of the forest was soon burned for planting; the laurisilva that survived is now a World Heritage Site. In the 15th century the island became Europe's leading sugar producer, a plantation economy built largely on slave labour. When American sugar displaced it, Madeira wine took over and made the island famous among the English and around the world. Christopher Columbus lived for a time on Porto Santo, married to the daughter of the island's captain. In the 19th century its mild climate turned it into a sanatorium and a destination for the European aristocracy, with legendary hotels such as Reid's Palace. Madeira gained political autonomy on 1 July 1976, after the Carnation Revolution, and today it is famous worldwide as the birthplace of Cristiano Ronaldo. The full story is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Oceanic Portugal: Madeira, the garden island of sugar, mill slavery and its famous wine; and the Azores, nine volcanic islands in the middle of the Atlantic, a stopover on the treasure fleet route, land of whalers and of a vast emigration to the Americas.
Read the history of Atlantic Islands →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
When the Portuguese caravels sighted it, Madeira had not a single inhabitant. It was a steep mountain covered down to the shore by forest so dense that, according to the chronicles, the ground was barely visible beneath the trees. Hence the name: 'madeira', wood in Portuguese.
The official 'discovery' came as part of the expeditions Prince Henry the Navigator was driving along the African coast. In 1418 two captains in the crown's service, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, were blown by a storm to a small island they named Porto Santo, 'holy port', because they had survived the gale there. The following year, in 1419, they returned better prepared and reached the larger island glimpsed on the horizon under a cloud: Madeira. A third captain joined them, Bartolomeu Perestrelo, who received Porto Santo.
Settlement began around 1425 with colonists from the mainland — nobles, peasants, convicts and also African and Guanche slaves brought as labour — divided into captaincies. Funchal, on the sheltered, sunny south coast, grew quickly thanks to its harbour and its abundance of fennel ('funcho', which gives the city its name). Within a few decades an empty island had become one of Europe's first Atlantic colonies and a laboratory for everything that would follow with Portuguese overseas expansion.
To farm an island covered in forest, the settlers did the quickest thing: they set fire to it. The chronicles — perhaps exaggerated, but telling — speak of a fire that burned for years and consumed much of the original forest, even forcing people to take refuge in the sea and in caves as the flames advanced. Whatever the real scale, the historical outcome is clear: much of the primary forest disappeared to make way for crops and, above all, for sugar cane.
What was left of that forest is today one of the island's greatest treasures. The laurisilva — a subtropical forest of laurels, til and vinhático trees, damp and thick with moss — is a relict ecosystem: in remote times it covered much of southern Europe, but it vanished from the continent after the ice ages. In Madeira it survived thanks to the mild climate and the island's isolation. Places such as the Fanal forest hold trees 500 to 700 years old, with twisted trunks emerging from the mist.
For its unique ecological value, Unesco declared the Laurisilva of Madeira a World Heritage Site in 1999. It now covers around 15,000 hectares, mostly in the north and on the high ground, and it is the green heart of the island and the setting for its famous levadas. Madeira's history begins, then, with a paradox: destroying its forest made the island's fortune, and what was saved from that fire is now its greatest pride.
On the ashes of the forest grew sugar cane, and with it Madeira's first great wealth. By the mid-15th century the island had become Europe's leading sugar producer. 'White gold' was then a hugely expensive luxury, and Funchal filled with Genoese, Flemish and Portuguese merchants. The profits built churches, palaces and Funchal cathedral itself. Madeiran sugar sweetened the tables of the European courts and financed much of the Atlantic expansion.
That prosperity had a dark foundation that deserves to be named without euphemism: the plantation economy rested largely on slave labour. From around 1452 slaves were imported — Berbers, Guanches captured in the Canaries and sub-Saharan Africans — for the brutal work of the sugar mills: cutting the cane, hauling it, feeding the mills and the boiling houses. Madeira thus served as one of the first models of the Atlantic slave plantation, a scheme that Portugal and other powers would later transfer, on a far larger scale, to Brazil and the Caribbean. To study Madeira is, in part, to study the prototype of that history.
The sugar cycle did not last forever. From the 16th century, mass, cheaper production in Brazil and other colonies drove prices down and pushed small Madeira aside. The mills closed or were converted, and the island had to find a new source of wealth. It found one in another plant that did well on its volcanic slopes: the vine.
Madeira wine was born almost by accident and ended up world famous. It was discovered that this fortified wine, exposed to the heat of the lodges and to long voyages in ships' holds, improved instead of spoiling: it grew more complex and practically immortal. Casks that crossed the tropics and came back were better for it, and that 'vinho da roda' (round-trip wine) became fashionable.
English merchants were key. Drawn by the trade, they settled in Funchal and turned Madeira wine into a luxury item of the Atlantic world: it was drunk in the American colonies, at the British court and at the most elegant tables. Shakespeare mentions it; and tradition holds that Madeira wine was used to toast the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776. The British presence was so strong that, during the Napoleonic wars, the United Kingdom 'amicably' occupied the island in 1801 and again between 1807 and 1814 to keep it out of French hands, leaving Portuguese sovereignty in name only.
A century before all that, the island had already crossed paths with world history. Christopher Columbus, then a young seaman involved in trade, spent time on Porto Santo in the 1480s, married to Filipa Moniz, daughter of Bartolomeu Perestrelo, the first captain-donatary of that island. On Porto Santo, Columbus is said to have studied currents, winds and the accounts of driftwood and seeds the sea brought from the west: clues that fed his idea that Asia could be reached by sailing out into the Atlantic. The house where he is supposed to have lived is now a small museum.
In the 19th century Madeira found a new vocation: elite tourism. Its mild, stable climate all year round, with neither extreme cold nor extreme heat, made it the fashionable place for the European aristocracy and upper bourgeoisie to spend the winter, and above all a sanatorium for tuberculosis and other respiratory illnesses, at a time when 'good air' was almost the only therapy available.
Steamships brought English, German and other European ladies and gentlemen, along with members of royal families. Empress Sisi of Austria spent time on the island seeking relief; later so did the last emperor of Austria, Charles I, who died in Madeira in 1922 and is buried in the church of Nossa Senhora do Monte. To house those visitors, legendary hotels were built such as Reid's Palace, opened in 1891 on a Funchal clifftop, which still operates and embodies that elegant, cosmopolitan Madeira.
That period left a lasting mark: botanical gardens, grand estates, a tradition of quality hotels and a tourist vocation that never faded. When the 20th century brought first flying boats, then the airport and later the cruise ships, tourism stopped being a matter for aristocrats and opened up to the world. Today it is the island's economic engine, but its roots lie in those 19th-century winters when all of Europe came to Madeira to recover and to look at the sea.
The 20th century brought Madeira the same upheavals as the rest of Portugal: the fall of the monarchy in 1910, Salazar's long Estado Novo dictatorship and, finally, the Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, which restored democracy. For the Atlantic islands, the decisive change came right afterwards: on 1 July 1976 the new constitution made Madeira an Autonomous Region, with its own regional government and parliament and broad powers over its own affairs, within Portugal and, since 1986, within the European Union as an outermost region.
The following decades transformed the island: tunnels and roads cut through the mountains, an economy geared to tourism and services, and major infrastructure works. Modernisation also had its tragedies, such as the floods and landslides of February 2010, which killed dozens of people in Funchal and the surrounding area and forced a rethink of water and slope management.
And in 1985 the island's most famous son was born in Funchal, in the humble Santo António neighbourhood: Cristiano Ronaldo dos Santos Aveiro. From kicking a ball around Madeira's steep streets he became one of the greatest footballers in history. The island claims him proudly: the airport bears his name (Aeroporto Internacional da Madeira Cristiano Ronaldo), there is a statue of him on the seafront and the CR7 Museum in Funchal displays his trophies. So the small island that began as a burning forest and grew rich on sugar and wine is today, for much of the world, also the land of Ronaldo: a fitting end to a story always tied to the Atlantic and to the ambition of looking further out.