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A postcard from Madeira
You can pay anything from €0.50cents down to €0.20cents for the same postcard - so shop around! Postage to Europe is €0.68, elsewhere €0.80.Once upon a time... well, in 1972 actually, my wife and I were married. We still are!
We spent our honeymoon on
Madeira, that Portuguese, mid-Atlantic island 520 kms
(320 miles) from the African coast and 1000 kms
(620 miles) from the continent of Europe. It was a picturesque, tranquil, slightly old-fashioned place, beloved of the blue-rinse brigade as a winter watering hole. In our late-twenties, we were probably the youngest foreigners on the island, but we enjoyed its simple way of life, its flower-fringed, winding roads and unspoiled mountain scenery.
We stayed for two weeks at the five-star Savoy Hotel. I was something important in the travel industry in those days and, even though we were on a freebie, we were given the honeymoon suite. I recall it was vast and had uninterrupted views out to sea on at least two sides. Whenever I returned to the island on business, the hotel’s General Manager always allocated me that same room, although I rattled around in it and, of course, it was never quite the same on my own. The tropical gardens were stunning, huge displays of cymbidium orchids
The Savoy woz 'ere
Shame. They knocked down a lovely hotel and are building concrete towers on the site. That's progress! adorned the lobby, and smartly-dressed staff opened doors as you approached. The top-floor restaurant was the size of two football pitches and, before dinner service started, the Maître d’ lined up his dozens of waiters and thoroughly inspected their hands and fingernails.
Now, two children, two grandchildren and 40 years on, we’d returned to the island to celebrate our Ruby Wedding Anniversary. Ironically, we came on a package holiday operated by the very company who bought the tour operator for which I worked - and which itself was eventually swallowed up by one of the German giants. Oh, and we paid full price this time.
Alas, we weren't able to stay at the Savoy Hotel again. They’ve knocked it down!
Instead, we chose the
Quinta da Penha de França, a small four-star hotel on French Hill
(Quinta=villa/manor/estate, Penha=Hill, de França=of the French) next to the former Savoy site. Its old manor house is dwarfed by newer wings of 76 rooms, all enjoying privileged positions amid spacious gardens with colourful shrubs, tall palms, bananas and mature jacaranda trees on high ground close to the sea. Through the gardens, past the swimming pool, under the scented jacarandas, through a door in the wall,
Gardens at Quinta da Penha de França
This was the view from our breakfast table every morning. across a little footbridge and down in a lift is its sister hotel, a concrete-block named the Penha França de Mar. Here, there are another 33 rooms, a lunchtime restaurant and a larger swimming pool, all at sea-level. A pleasant 15-minute walk along the flat, sea-front esplanade then takes us to the centre of Funchal, the island's capital. We can use both hotels’ facilities; in fact, I started this blog beside the pool at the Penha França de Mar while enjoying a club-sandwich, a local Coral beer and waves sloshing gently against the wall beside me.
But we hadn’t come here just to stay in a hotel - as pleasant as it may have been to while away an hour or two on our balcony at the Quinta gazing out over the gardens and the pool to the blue sea beyond. We’d come to see some familiar sights, to discover some new ones, and to see how the island had fared over the years.
1972 was a long time ago
(are those violins I hear in the background?) – and, yes, Madeira has changed.
The Escudo has been replaced by the Euro. EU funds have drilled dozens
The best rooms at Quinta da Penha de França
Our room was on the ground floor immediately to the left of Pat (my wife), who is walking down to the pool. of long road tunnels and built bridges and motorways, making it quicker and easier to crash cars and to reach the rugged mountains and north coast.
The once short, cliff-side runway of Funchal Airport (renamed Madeira International), feared by even specially-trained pilots, has been extended so that planes no longer drop off the end. On a breezy day, it's still rather like landing on an aircraft carrier though!
The Portuguese economy is now in tatters, EU funds have dried up, and the younger generation has lost its optimism and left the island to find work elsewhere. Madeira, you see, lacks mineral and oil wealth and, while it’s a sort of tax haven for some industries and self-sufficient in things like bananas, fortified wine and embroidery, it relies very heavily on tourism. With only 33,000 hotel beds (and that’s probably four times more than 40 years ago!) and a few thousand extra visitors on high-rise cruise ships most days, there’s limited employment for its 270,000 or so inhabitants. However, with magnificent flowers and scenery, a year-round pleasant climate and friendly, multi-lingual people, it’s fair to say that 'tourism' is something Madeira does very well indeed.
Funchal, the capital,
is home to almost half of the island’s population and its terracotta-tiled houses rise ever higher up the slopes of the surrounding hills where banana plantations once stood. There have never been more than a handful of hotels in the town centre; the likes of the (ex)Savoy, the Quinta da Penha de França and Reid’s Palace were always on top of cliffs at the western edge of town, each with its own sea-level lido. Today, in the Funchal area, most accommodation is farther away to the west, in a sprawling development of hotels, apartments and timeshares, some smart and expensive, some characterless, could-be-anywhere. This, for us, was the biggest visual change but, staying at the Quinta, we didn’t need to pass that way more than once, out of curiosity.
Fortunately, the very centre of Funchal has changed precious little over the years. There are now moorings for pleasure yachts along its seafront, fashionable modern shopping centres with food courts and, of course, lots more cars, busses, zebra crossings and traffic lights. However, the old buildings retain much of their character, pavements are still decorated with black and white mosaics, and roads needing repair don’t have their cobbles replaced by
Zona Velha
The atmospheric old town. The cable-car station for the ride up to Monte is close by. tarmac. Even the traditional, up-market shop at which we bought a honeymoon souvenir - a large, hand-decorated ceramic cockerel that today ornaments a corner of our bedroom
(how on earth did we ever get it home in one piece?) - is still there all these years later, and it continues to sell similar products in a distinctly familiar setting.
The Zona Velha, the historic old quarter centred on Rua de Santa Maria, is now an even more pleasant place in which to wander. It has a unique atmosphere, doors to apartments and shops have become inventive works of art, and the pedestrianised streets are made even narrower in places as tables from countless bars and restaurants spill out onto the way. Most restaurants have an insistent but polite tout inviting you to try their menus - just tell them that you've already made a reservation elsewhere, they're very understanding! One restaurant without a tout stands out in our memory, the
Gavião Novo. It serves fish to die for - start with the grilled mussels or the fish soup and then share a grilled red snapper – in a word: delicious! It’ll set you back €60
(around £50/US$80) for two, including
Restaurante do Forte
The restaurant's inside the fort, so you could have a table out on the ramparts (blankets supplied if it's chilly!). bread, wine, water and waiters with corny jokes – and it's worth every penny.
Talking of food, at the far end of the old town is an equally old fort painted in a distinctive yellow-ochre colour - the Forte de São Tiago. It houses a museum of contemporary art and what is surely the capital’s best eatery, the smart
Restaurante do Forte. For a special meal and incredible value for money, this is
the place – you choose any starter, main course and dessert from the pricey à la carte menu, and they'll serve you a glass of bubbly as an aperitif, together with a strawberry and some melted chocolate to dip it in, a fish or seafood pâté, bread roll, butter, a fruit sorbet between courses, mineral water, copious white wine with the starter, red wine with the main course, and Madeira wine with the dessert, plus coffee, attentive service and truly exquisite presentation of every dish - all for a mere €35
(£29/US$46) each! We had our anniversary meal there and were so impressed that we returned for dinner on our last night too.
You could be forgiven for thinking we’ve become high-spending gourmets, but we occasionally skipped
Cable-car to Monte
A quick and efficient way to reach Monte and there's another one, after a short walk from there, down to the Botanical Gardens. lunch as we’d had the included all-you-can-eat, hot and cold buffet breakfast at the Quinta - and we did eat
very simply at other times!
Cable-cars seem to have become the ‘in’ thing here in recent years (more of the EU money, perhaps?). We took one with seven-seat cabins for the 3.7 kms
(2¼ miles), 15-minute journey from near Funchal’s old town to Monte, 560m
(1,840 feet) up above. From there, we walked a few minutes and took another cable-car with slightly larger, eight-seat cabins for the 1.6 kms
(1 mile), 9-minute ride down, across the João Gomes Valley, to the Botanical Gardens. I guess we could then have taken a bus back to town, but we returned the way we came - so four rides and admission to the gardens on a combined ticket, costing €28.25
(£23/US$37) each, proved an immensely enjoyable, educational and exhausting full day out.
Monte, as its name suggests, is up in the hills above Funchal. In days gone by, folk used to retreat there during the heat of summer. The Church of our Lady of Monte, for those energetic enough to brave its steep flight of steps, is quite interesting. Inside, apart
Monte
Part of a wicker toboggan and the carreiro's straw hat. Scroll down the page for more pictures. from typically ornate religious decoration, you’ll discover the tomb of the deposed monarch Carolus I (“Blessed Charles of Austria”), the last Emperor of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who died in exile on the island in 1922.
To get back from Monte to Funchal down the steep cobbled streets, they used to take a “Carro do Monte", a wicker toboggan with wooden runners, pushed, pulled and guided by a couple of 'carreiros' wearing stout boots and straw hats. These days, toboggans and men in straw hats are there aplenty but, of course, it’s simply a tourist trap. It costs many times more than we paid in '72 and the ride is now only half of what it was then – it's been brought to an abrupt halt by a motorway that's since been built across the downhill route! On this trip, we opted to cling on to our memories of forty years ago rather than to the sides of an uncomfortable toboggan.
The Botanical Gardens, built in 1960 on terraces of a steep hillside that was once part of the Quinta do Bom Sucesso, are pleasant and colourful, displaying over two thousand exotic plants, both endemic and from all over
Take a well-deserved bow
The young musicians of the Madeira Mandolin Orchestra are very talented. The 12-year-old boy on the left played a long solo without music or a wrong note! the world. Plants grow well on Madeira - something to do with the volcanic soil and good year-round climate. There's a fabulous bed of foliage plants arranged in geometric patterns at the gardens' centre and some immense views towards the town and harbour. If you're into museums, there's also a rather incongruous natural history one in the old manor house with a collection of fossils, rocks, stuffed fish and the like. We preferred the scented, pale blue wisteria that clambered around its front door!
The island has a long association with Britain and, while most churches here are Roman Catholic and Portuguese-speaking, there's an unusual Anglican one in Funchal, known as "
The English Church" (or, more correctly Holy Trinity Church). It's a bit off the usual tourist streets, surrounded by residential housing in attractive walled gardens, where signs invite you to please walk on the grass and to smell the flowers. It has a dome rather than a spire and there are elegant columns on either side of the front door. From the outside, it looks more like a miniature theatre than a church. Indeed, while religious services are its main function, it's also the venue for a variety of music
Walking the levadas
A great way to spend a day (but choose a warm one!). concerts. We attended a regular Friday night one of light classics given by the
Madeira Mandolin Orchestra, a group of young mandolin and guitar players. Click
here to listen to a couple of their music videos. They are very talented and received a standing ovation from a full house the night we saw them.
If you're feeling energetic, this mountainous island is a paradise for walkers. It's particularly known for hikes alongside its levadas
(Portuguese for 'led'😉, more than 2,170 kms
(1,350 miles) of man-made aqueducts. They were built to bring water from the mountainous west and northwest of the island to the drier, flatter southeast, which is more suited to habitation and the growing of crops. The first levada was constructed in the 16th century to irrigate crops like the sugar cane that made many men very wealthy in those days. Construction was extremely difficult, all the water courses having to be cut by hand into and through rocky mountainsides. Originally privately owned, they're now government controlled and, while still providing water for farmers, hydro-electric power is generated by some of them too. The maintenance paths alongside them provide a remarkable network of walks, some easy, some for the very
The group walking the levadas
The guide, who's been doing this full-time for 15 years, was very knowledgeable about the flora and fauna. fit, and some only suitable for those who don't suffer from vertigo. In places, narrow ledges are potential death traps a long way from any medical help so, while it's perfectly feasible to walk on your own, I went with a guided group.
It was darn cold up in the mountains - just 3ºC when we arrived at about 10.00a.m., warming up(!) to around 10ºC by the time we rested to enjoy a packed lunch in the afternoon. We followed the courses of two levadas, seeing the high Riscos waterfall and what was called the 25 Fontes
(25 fountains or springs), although that number was probably a bit optimistic given the dry winter they'd had on the island. We returned by way of a very long and very damp tunnel. One advantage of the group arrangement was that the minibus used for our journey to the start of the walk was awaiting our arrival somewhere totally different at the end. Another was that the slowest didn't get lost - it was usually me who was last in line, busily taking photos while everyone wandered on ahead, but sometimes it was Natasha, a blond Russian in white shoes with heels!
Funchal's wonderful market
Viewed from the first floor I mentioned that plants grow well on Madeira. On this walk, vast forests of tall Bay trees covered the hillsides (one of the largest ancient Laurisilva forests in existence anywhere in the world), and we were introduced to a variety of heather that grows like a tree, giant dandelions more than two metres tall, and buttercups with flowers the size of small coffee cups!
We saw little in the way of birdlife - my brother and his wife, both very keen ornithologists, were also disappointed that they didn't see more on their visit four years ago (see their blog "
A postcard from Madeira"). They still saw more than us though - we did
hear a few on this walk and many others in the Quinta's gardens, but - ignoring gulls and the occasional sparrow - our tally of identified species was a grand total of one, the Chaffinches shown in my photos further down the page. They're probably a particular sub-species, however!
Back in Funchal, we made several visits to the town's wonderful market, the Mercado dos Lavradores
(the Workers' Market). We could never be bored with its colour and sumptuous displays of fruit and vegetables, flowers and fish. It's
Just one of the flower carpets
Thousands of blooms, creatively arranged full of locals filling their bags with the fresh produce and tourists like us filling their cameras' memory cards. I've heard tales of non-locals being ripped off by the fruit stalls on the first floor, so be warned - don't fall for the free sample tastings. Incidentally, there's a very pleasant outdoor café on the top floor, providing you're of a patient disposition - the six bodies behind the bar and just one on the floor for the hundred people wanting to order, receive their drinks or get their bill brings a whole new meaning to the word 'waiter'.
We'd timed our visit to coincide with Madeira's annual Flower Festival. In fact, we'd postponed our anniversary celebrations for a month to be here at the right time! We certainly weren't disappointed by this spectacular floral celebration.
While I was freezing in the mountains on my levada walk, Pat was enjoying the sunshine on a stroll around the town, where preparations for the festival were well under way. Thousands of colourful blooms were being laid by hand to form 'carpets' beneath the arching blue jacaranda trees along the main pedestrian avenidas, the finished examples of which we both enjoyed
Flower Festival - the flower market
Orchids and plants of all sorts were beautifully displayed and were all for sale the next day. Orchids of many colours, strelitzia (the 'bird of paradise' flower), lilies, chrysanthemums, protea and countless others had been laid on beds of pine twigs in geometric, butterfly and musical patterns. Nearby, were a market where plants and bulbs could be bought for a song, a marquee displaying wondrous flower arrangements, and a display of huge framed pictures made from living orchids. Attractive young women, wearing suitably sculpted dresses and adorned with flowers, mingled with the crowds, frequently posing for photographs. The crowds parted to allow a folk group from the town of Camacha, dressed in traditional white costumes and pixie hats, to wander through, playing instruments and singing their happy ditties as they went.
In the cool of the following morning, we once again enjoyed the carpets in the Avenida Arriaga, some now being tended to replace wilting blossoms, as they would continue to be for the next few days. The main event today was to be the children's parade and, although short, it was very colourful with hundreds of children carrying flowers, singly or in big bunches, to the town square. There, they symbolically planted the blossoms on a 'Wall of Hope' and then, to
much cheering, thousands of pigeons were released.
The highlight of the festival was reserved for Sunday afternoon: a grand parade stretching for a few miles along the Avenida do Mar to the Praça do Mar
(Sea Square) that was to last for over two hours.
We arrived well ahead of the expected crowds, choosing a low roadside wall near the end of the route on which to perch. The sun shone brightly in a blue and cloudless sky. We roasted for the next few hours with our backs to the sea as thousands gathered behind barriers on the opposite side of the road, on grassy banks and even high above in cliff-top public gardens. From our roadside spot, we had uninterrupted views of all the proceedings. Unfortunately, those proceedings included a live television broadcast with an apparently well-known celebrity presenter on an ego trip; he constantly leapt aboard the floats, interviewed dancers and members of the audience - his presence, with associated cameras and sound technicians, was a bit of an interference. Nonetheless, we did enjoy the fantastically decorated floats, accompanied by costumed dancers and loud music, which passed immediately in front of us.
Some of the
The Flower Festival Parade
An example of the fabulous use of Madeira's flowers displays' names: "Madeira - Europe's Jewellery Box", "From the Sea to the Island of Flowers", and "Glorious", and the pictures you'll find if you scroll down to the pages that follow, can give only an impression of the incredible colour and atmosphere of that procession. It was a fitting end to a wonderful week on this wonderful island - and well worth the sunburn!
Violin crescendo fades... Remember to scroll down for more pictures, then click on 'Next' for another page... There are about 150 pictures in total! Double-click on pictures to enlarge them.
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David - Half of the grey haired nomads
non-member comment
Flowers and more flowers!
Hi, Little brother, Delighted you had a wonderful trip down memory lane. Bring the photos to the garden party! Big brother