Portugal

Madeira & Porto Santo 15
The island of Madeira ,
850km (527 miles) southwest of Portugal,
is just the mountain peak of an enormous
volcanic mass. The island’s craggy spires
and precipices of umber-dark basalt end
with a sheer drop into the blue water of
the Atlantic Ocean, which is so deep near
Madeira that large sperm whales often
come close to the shore. If you stand on
the sea-swept balcony of Cabo Girão, one
of the world’s highest ocean cliffs
(590m/1,935 ft. above sea level), you’ll
easily realize the island’s Edenlike quality,
which inspired Luís Vaz de Camões, the
Portuguese national poet, to say Madeira
lies “at the end of the world.”
The summit of the mostly undersea
mountain is at Madeira’s center, where Pico
Ruivo, often snowcapped, rises to an altitude
of 1,860m (6,100 ft.) above sea level.
It is from this mountain peak that a series
of deep, rock-strewn ravines cuts through
the countryside and projects all the way to
the edge of the sea. The island of Madeira
is only 56km (35 miles) long and about
21km (13 miles) across at its widest point.
It has nearly 160km (99 miles) of coastline,
but no beaches. In Madeira’s volcanic soil,
plants and flowers blaze like creations from
Gauguin’s Tahitian palette. With jacaranda,
masses of bougainvillea, orchids, geraniums,
whortleberry, prickly pear, poinsettias,
cannas, frangipani, birds of paradise,
and wisteria, the land is a veritable botanical
garden. Custard apples, avocados, mangoes,
and bananas grow profusely
throughout the island. Fragrances such as
vanilla and wild fennel mingle with sea
breezes and permeate the ravines that sweep
down the rocky headlands.
In 1419, João Gonçalves Zarco and
Tristão Vaz Teixeira of Portugal discovered
Madeira after being diverted by a storm
while exploring the west coast of Africa,
some 564km (350 miles) east. Because the
island was densely covered with impenetrable
virgin forests, they named it Madeira
(wood). Soon it was set afire to clear it for
habitation. The blaze is said to have lasted
7 years, until all but a small northern section
was reduced to ashes. Today the hillsides
are so richly cultivated that you’d
never know there had been such extensive
fires. Many of the island’s groves and vineyards,
protected by buffers of sugar cane,
grow on stone-wall ledges next to the
cliff’s edge. Carrying water from mountain
springs, a complex network of manmade
levadas (water channels) irrigates
these terraced mountain slopes.
The uncovered levadas, originally constructed
of stone by slaves and convicts
(beginning at the time of the earliest colonization
and slowly growing into a huge
network), are most often .3 to .6m (1–2
ft.) wide and deep. By the turn of the 20th
century, the network stretched for
1,000km (620 miles). In the past century,
however, the network has grown to some
2,140km (1,327 miles), of which about
40km (25 miles) are covered tunnels dug
into the mountains.
Madeira is both an island and the name
of the autonomous archipelago to which it
belongs. The island of Madeira has the largest
landmass of the archipelago, some 460
sq. km (179 sq. miles). The only other
inhabited island in the Madeira archipelago
is Porto Santo (about 26 sq. km/10 sq.
miles), 40km (25 miles) to the northeast of
the main island of Madeira. Réalités magazine
called Porto Santo “another world, arid,
desolate, and waterless.” Unlike Madeira,