History · Madeira

Madeira: The First Atlantic Colony

An uninhabited Atlantic island settled by Portugal from 1420 — the laboratory where the sugar-and-slavery plantation was invented, then a wine island, and now an autonomous region living on tourism

By Worldlore Editorial · 19 September 2026

Ancient gnarled laurel trees wrapped in moss in a misty upland forest
The laurisilva forest of Fanal — a survivor of the laurel woodland that once covered southern Europe, and a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Much of Madeira's forest was burned off by the first settlers. (Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0)

A test run for empire

Madeira is a small volcanic archipelago in the Atlantic, about 800 kilometres south-west of mainland Portugal, with roughly 250,000 people, most of them around the capital, Funchal. It was uninhabited when the Portuguese arrived, and it was the first territory of the Portuguese overseas empire — the place where the methods that would be used across the Atlantic world, and above all the sugar plantation worked by enslaved labour, were first tried out.

A short history

  1. 1419

    The landing

    Portuguese captains reach the uninhabited islands.

  2. from 1420

    Settlement

    The first colony of the Portuguese empire; the forest is burned.

  3. 1450s–1500

    The sugar era

    Madeira is Europe's leading sugar producer.

  4. 16th–17th centuries

    Wine

    Madeira pivots to fortified wine as sugar moves to Brazil.

  5. 1801 / 1807–1814

    British occupations

    Britain garrisons Madeira in the Napoleonic Wars.

  6. 19th–20th centuries

    Emigration

    Madeirans leave for Brazil, Venezuela, the US and beyond.

  7. 1976

    Autonomy

    Madeira becomes an autonomous region of Portugal.

Settlement and sugar

Portuguese captains sent by Prince Henry the Navigator reached Madeira in 1419, and settlement began the following year. The dense forest that gave the island its name — madeira means "wood" — was cleared by a fire that reportedly burned for years, and settlers cut the levadas, irrigation channels carrying water from the wet north to the terraced south; the network now runs to some 3,000 kilometres.

Steep hillside farm terraces above a Madeira valley, fed by an irrigation channel
Terraced fields fed by a levada. The terracing and channels were first built to grow sugar cane. (muffinn / Wikimedia Commons)

From the 1450s Madeira became Europe's leading producer of sugar, worked by enslaved people — Canary Islanders at first, then Africans. It was here that the Atlantic plantation model took shape, and by 1500 that model, its cane, and its personnel were being transferred to São Tomé and Brazil, whose far larger plantations undercut Madeira's sugar within a few decades. Christopher Columbus lived on the islands in the 1470s and 80s, trading sugar.

The wine island

Madeira turned to wine. Its position on the sea routes to the Americas and the East made it a standard provisioning stop, and Madeira wine — fortified with brandy, and found to improve with the heat and rolling of a long voyage — became hugely popular, especially in the British colonies of North America and the Caribbean.

The wooden balconied courtyard of a historic Madeira wine lodge in Funchal
A wine lodge in Funchal. British merchant houses dominated the Madeira wine trade, and a large British community shaped the town. (H. Zell / Wikimedia Commons)

Britain occupied Madeira twice during the Napoleonic Wars to keep it from France, and from the mid-19th century Funchal grew as one of Europe's first winter resorts, marketed as a mild-climate retreat for invalids. Vine blights in the 1850s and 1870s devastated the vineyards, and the wine industry recovered on a smaller scale.

Autonomy, and tourism

The white-and-stone Sé cathedral of Funchal with its dark tiled roof and bell tower
Funchal Cathedral, completed around 1514 with sugar-trade money. Madeira stayed a poor Portuguese province, and emigration to Brazil, Venezuela, the United States and elsewhere was constant. (Diego Delso / Wikimedia Commons)

After Portugal's 1974 revolution, Madeira gained political autonomy in 1976, with its own government and assembly, run continuously since by the centre-right and for decades by a single dominant figure. EU membership from 1986 brought funds for tunnels, roads and an airport extension built on stilts over the sea — and a high regional debt. Tourism is now the mainstay of the economy. A flash flood in Funchal in 2010 killed around 50 people.

What Madeira carries

Madeira's importance is out of all proportion to its size. As the first piece of the Portuguese empire and the first Atlantic sugar colony, it was where Europe learned how to turn an ocean island into a plantation — a template that would be scaled up, with terrible consequences, across the Americas. After sugar left, the island reinvented itself around wine, then health tourism, then mass tourism, each time trading on the same asset: its position in the middle of the Atlantic.

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