Madeira

Madeira was uninhabited when Portuguese navigators under João Gonçalves Zarco landed in 1419, making it the first territory claimed in what became the Portuguese Age of Discovery. Settlers cleared and burned the dense forest — the name means "wood" — and planted sugar cane, which by the late fifteenth century made Funchal wealthy and was worked in part by enslaved Africans and Canary Islanders. Christopher Columbus lived on Madeira and neighbouring Porto Santo, married to the daughter of Porto Santo's governor.

When cheaper Atlantic and Brazilian sugar undercut the island, Madeira turned to wine. Madeira wine — fortified, deliberately heated, and almost indestructible once opened — became a major export, especially to Britain and its American colonies, and was reputedly used to toast the US Declaration of Independence. A long-standing British merchant community, and later British and northern European tourists wintering at hotels such as Reid's, shaped Funchal.

After Portugal's 1974 revolution, Madeira became an autonomous region with its own parliament and government, keeping Portuguese sovereignty, the euro, and EU membership. Regional politics was long dominated by one figure, Alberto João Jardim, from 1978 to 2015. In 2010, flash floods and mudslides killed around 50 people in and above Funchal. The economy today is heavily tourism-based, along with bananas, wine, flowers, and a business free-trade zone, and the island is proud of its most famous son, the footballer Cristiano Ronaldo, after whom the airport is named.

Madeiran culture is rural Portuguese and Catholic, with festivals — Carnival, the spring Flower Festival, the autumn wine and chestnut harvests, and the huge New Year fireworks — structuring the year. Folk music with the braguinha (a small guitar that is an ancestor of the ukulele) and bailinho dancing, wicker craft from Camacha, and embroidery, once a major cottage industry, are the traditional arts.

Emigration is woven into island life: hardship sent Madeirans to Venezuela, Brazil, South Africa, the United States, and the Channel Islands, and returnees and their remittances have long shaped Funchal and the villages, visible in the grander houses and in businesses funded from abroad.

Hospitality is warm and food- and wine-centred, the pace outside Funchal is slow, and there is a strong attachment to the parish, the levada, and the family plot of vines or bananas.

About 250,000 people live in Madeira, more than half in the Funchal area, which climbs the slopes of a natural amphitheatre above the harbour; the north coast and the interior villages are far quieter and, in places, losing population.

The economy is dominated by tourism and the services around it, along with agriculture on the terraces — bananas for export, wine, sugar cane for rum, tropical fruit, and flowers — and the international business centre in Funchal. The cost of imported goods is high, and jobs outside tourism and the public sector are limited, which continues to send some young Madeirans to the mainland and abroad.

Daily life runs on the steep roads and tunnels, the levada for water and walking, the café and the market, and a climate that never really turns cold.

The Madeiran table has a few unmistakable items. Espetada is beef rubbed with garlic and bay, skewered on a laurel stick, and grilled over embers, served hanging from a stand with milho frito (fried cubes of cornmeal) and bolo do caco — a soft, round flatbread cooked on a stone and slathered with garlic butter, which accompanies almost everything.

From the sea comes espada (black scabbardfish), a deep-water fish with an alarming look, classically fried and served with banana; lapas (limpets); and tuna steaks with molho de vilão. Picado (garlicky beef strips and chips to share) and sopa de tomate e cebola with a poached egg are everyday dishes, and bolo de mel (a dark, spiced molasses cake) is the festive sweet.

The island's drink is poncha — sugarcane spirit (aguardente de cana) mixed with honey and lemon, or with orange and passion-fruit in the "pescador" version — stirred with a wooden caralhinho. Madeira wine, in its Sercial, Verdelho, Bual, and Malmsey styles, is tasted at the Funchal wine lodges, and Coral beer and the passion-fruit soda Brisa are the local soft options.

Funchal has the fifteenth-century cathedral, the vivid Mercado dos Lavradores, the wine lodges, and cable cars up to Monte — with its gardens and the famous wicker toboggan ride, in which two straw-hatted carreiros steer a sledge down the steep streets. The airport's viewing area and the Cristiano Ronaldo museum draw their own visitors.

The interior is the real attraction. The Pico do Arieiro to Pico Ruivo ridge walk crosses Madeira's roof — Ruivo, at 1,862 metres, is the summit — on a spectacular, exposed path of steps and tunnels. The laurisilva forest, protected as a World Heritage Site, is best seen on the levada walks: the Levada do Caldeirão Verde to a fern-hung amphitheatre, and the Levada das 25 Fontes to a cluster of springs. Fanal, where ancient stag-headed laurel trees stand in drifting fog, is otherworldly.

Around the coast are the Ponta de São Lourenço, a bare, striated peninsula at the eastern tip; the fishing village of Câmara de Lobos and the Cabo Girão skywalk above one of Europe's highest sea cliffs; the natural volcanic swimming pools at Porto Moniz; and the A-frame thatched houses of Santana. A short hop away, Porto Santo has the nine-kilometre golden beach that Madeira itself lacks.