W a y m a r k s ~: Summer in Madeira

Paul Bowles

“When I first thought of visiting Madeira I was advised by my English friends to reconsider. “You’ll loathe it,” they told me. “No character whatever.”

“Dreary, stuffy little place.”

“Nobody goes there but very elderly ladies.”

“Madeira! Whatever for?”

“I had a great aunt who used to go religiously. I believe the poor thing eventually died out there.”

“It’s the absolute end!”

This unanimity of adverse opinion might have dissuaded me had I not already made up my mind that I was going there no matter what; besides, it turned out each time that my informant had not actually been there, but was expressing an opinion prevalent nowadays in literary London.”

Much the same advice was given to me some sixty years later when I was first thinking of travelling to Madeira. The American novelist and composer, Paul Bowles, spent a month on Madeira in 1959 (he wrote the piece quoted above for Holiday Magazine in 1960). At that time the only way to get there was by ship: “There is no airstrip, and the seaplane service was discontinued in 1958.” This has changed now. I would dearly love to have arrived by the imagined genteel Art Deco era elegance of a large, sleek Aquila Airways seaplane, but nowadays Madeira has a modest yet very modern airport. The landing approach to which is quite definitely one of the most spectacular in the world, it’s almost aerobatic in fact!

An Aquila Airways Seaplane arriving at Funchal, 1956

It is quite a sight. Set in the midst of the vast flat nothingness of the Atlantic Ocean, seeing the island slowly rising up out of the white mist was genuinely magical. Approaching the island from the north, our plane headed towards Ponta de São Lourenço, the easternmost tip of the main island of Madeira. As we began to descend, the aeroplane arced around the headland to the island’s east coast, levelling out and heading south along the rugged sheer-sided shoreline. The plane then banked steeply round, doubling back upon itself as it zeroed in on the runway of the new airport, which looks like a tall-stilted balcony clinging to the cliffside overhanging the sea. Watching the passing coastline rapidly magnifying itself from far below as the plane dropped its altitude. I could see the white foam of the dark blue sea breaking on the black rocks, the town of Santa Cruz and the tall green slopes of the hillside rising high above the town. The plane banked sharply round first one way then the other. It is quite an exhilarating, rollercoaster-like way to arrive. I imagine it must be even more ‘fun’ to experience when there are crosswinds and turbulence; fortunately for us though, it was quite a tranquil and sun-drenched day when we arrived.

Our first view of Madeira

Madeira means a ‘wood’ in Portuguese. The island’s name is thought to derive from the fact that when Portuguese explorers, led by João Gonçlaves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, first took possession of the uninhabited islands in 1419, it was very densely wooded. The Portuguese first settled on the smaller and flatter nearby island of Porto Santo. As many of the guidebooks and Bowles recounts, in a first attempt to tame Madeira, the Portuguese set fire to the impenetrable woodland on the main island and it subsequently burned for seven years, decimating the original ancient forest cover. Over the subsequent centuries as the vegetation recovered, the tropical abundance of the island has been bolstered by the introduction of numerous plants gathered from all corners of the earth during those early days by roving Portuguese mariners.

Coming in to land

The mild, stable year-round climate and plentiful rainfall enable a wide range of trees and flowering plants to flourish here, so much so that the Portuguese have long described the island as the ‘Flor do Oceano’ or the ‘Flower of the Ocean.’ The volcanic origins of the island also mean it has a dramatic topography with soaring hills, precipitous ridges and sheer cliff-faces. This also means that the island doesn’t really have any beaches, at least none of the golden sandy sort so beloved of sun-worshipping tourists, hence perhaps why Madeira is not commonly seen as a young person’s holiday destination. And the fact that the weather can turn in an instant, being stuck out in the notoriously changeable and often inclement Atlantic mean that rain showers are a fairly regular occurrence. Another reason perhaps as to why the island has been a popular year-round holiday destination for the British, who are perhaps climatically predisposed not to mind a drop or two of rain!

Prince Henry, 'The Navigator'

Although the island was first settled under the orders of Prince Henry ‘the Navigator’ in the 1400s, at the dawn of the Portuguese ‘Age of Discovery’, intended to serve as a staging post for further explorations down the coast of Africa, it is thought that the island was already known about beforehand, having very likely been discovered by Arab seamen, or perhaps even earlier by the Romans, Carthaginians, or even the Phoenicians. Madeira was first noted on a Florentine nautical chart in 1351, but there are various iterations of a myth involving an English nobleman and woman arriving here which precede this date. The various versions of the myth describe Sir Robert Machyn (or Machin) and Anne Dorset as ill-fated lovers who were exiled here in 1346, with one or other of them leaving the island when their partner died, although another version has them both dying on the island together. There are no records extant to substantiate any part of this story, but it is said that Zarco discovered a wooden cross inscribed with the couple’s story, perhaps marking their joint grave (or the grave of one or other of them), and that he built a church on the site to honour their memory at the place now known as Machico, not far up the coast from the modern-day airport.

Christopher Columbus

João Gonçlaves Zarco

Prince Henry was the main reason why I wanted to visit Madeira, and during my trip there I was engrossed in reading Peter Russell’s excellent biography. A statue of Prince Henry now keeps a doleful watch over a roundabout in Funchal, not far from a similar statue honouring Christopher Columbus, who before his famous voyage to the Americas came to Madeira as a merchant buying sugar. Columbus lived on nearby Porto Santo in the early 1480s and there married the Portuguese governor’s daughter, Filipa Moniz Perestrelo. Another statue in the centre of Funchal honours João Gonçlaves Zarco, such that Madeira’s long history and its pivotal position in the era of Portuguese maritime exploration is very apparent still. In a sense, reaching Madeira was for me a kind of homecoming as well as another step in my own personal exploration of the globe, given that my first trip overseas was to the Algarve when I was just eight years old. On that first holiday abroad we visited the old navigation school at Cabo de São Vicente, a place which had quite a deep effect upon me and perhaps first seeded my deep interest in the history of exploration and explorers. The familiar sights, sounds, smells and tastes of Portuguese architecture, everyday life, and Portuguese cuisine certainly made me feel instantly at home here on the island of Madeira.

Funchal Harbour

The island’s capital, Funchal, is a wonderful little town to wander around. Filled with old churches and picturesque squares with distinctive black and white patterned pavements which also reminded me a lot of my several trips to Macao. For me, thoughts of Portugal are always linked to food, and seafood in particular: grilled sardines and buttery boiled potatoes being a particular favourite of mine. Tastes and smells are some of the most evocative sparks to memory that we have, and the smell and taste of grilled fish always reminds me of that first trip I made as a child to Portugal. In Macao I would always seek out a wonderful family-run restaurant called Alfonso III, not far from the main square. The food there always instantly transported me back into my eight-year-old self on holiday long before in the Algarve. As I get older I’ve come to realise that such sensory memories have begun to accrue within me like archaeological layers of personal journeys and places previously visited; because now a plate of grilled sardines evokes a series of memories which are all linked through the long slow passing of time from childhood to adulthood, in this instance, running back from Madeira, through Macao to the Algarve.

Here in Madeira one of the local specialities is a fish which you don’t come across on the Portuguese mainland and that is the black scabbard fish, or ‘espada preta.’ The espada is a curious-looking fish, scaleless and eel-like in appearance with large glassy eyes and a ferociously toothy mouth, it looks almost prehistoric. It grows up to two metres or six feet in length and lives roughly 1000m/3300ft below the ocean’s surface during the day, but rises to around 800m/2600ft at night when it is caught by local fishermen trailing long lines from their boats. Given the fact that it normally lives at such depths, the process of hauling it to the surface and the attendant change in pressure is what kills the fish; hence it loses its iridescence turning jet black and its eyes acquire that milky-glassy appearance as they burst inside with the sudden decrease in pressure as they swiftly reach the surface.

Black Scabbard Fish

The espada are only found here in the waters off Madeira and curiously also off the coast of Japan (although I’ve yet to see them on sale in the fish markets there). One of the best places to see these unusual fish is where they are sold at Funchal’s ‘Mercado dos Lavradores’, or the ‘Peasant’s Market.’ The name rather belies the reality somewhat, as this is a magnificent Art Deco market hall built in the 1930s. The first part of the hall is split level and sells a colourful assortment of fruit and vegetables on the ground floor; the top floor has a fantastic array of candied fruit for sale. It’s a beautiful building to wander around, with its decorative blue and white tiled frescos. At the rear of the market hall is the fish market where you can see all sorts of fish on sale from huge tuna to small sardines, along with all sizes of fish in between, including the ferocious looking black scabbard fish. It’s well worth a trip to see both markets when trading is in full flow. The more usual way to see the black scabbard fish though is probably on your dinner plate in one of the many restaurants across the island, where it is served in a variety of ways but usually accompanied by a cooked, locally grown banana – which might sound odd, but the two tastes complement each other perfectly.

Mercado dos Lavradores

Comparing my impressions of Madeira in 2017 to those of Paul Bowles in 1959, there were quite a few continuities: “In one respect my London friends were right: most of the visitors to the island are British.” He notes that they all seem to stay in ‘British-run’ hotels, where the food is awful and they spend all their time talking about the weather: “It was the monotony of the ‘English’ meals which finally decided me to change living quarters. I moved into town to a Portuguese hotel with a brazenly Portuguese bill-of-fare, and never looked back with longing on the roast beef and Yorkshire pudding.” Certainly, some of the best food I’ve ever had during my travels I ate here on Madeira which has many good restaurants. It’s true though that most of the overseas visitors to the island come from the UK, but we did meet a few other Europeans. Most of the people we chatted with talked about the recent shock of Brexit. There was one English couple we met who were apoplectic about the UK’s decision to leave the European Union. Madeira and Portugal have connections to Britain which go back far further than the founding of the EU. Indeed, in 1660 Catherine of Braganza, daughter of Portugal’s King João IV, married England’s King Charles II. The marriage contract secured Britain certain trading rights in Madeira which enabled English merchants to prosper here and Madeira wine soon became a chief export to Britain as a consequence. The British also defended Madeira when Napoleon’s troops occupied mainland Portugal in 1807. It was during this time that the Anglican Holy Trinity Church and the British cemetery were established in Funchal.

The bust of Philippa of Lancaster, Holy Trinity Church

In the grounds of Holy Trinity Church there is a bust of Philippa of Lancaster which commemorates an earlier connection between the Portuguese and British Royal families. Philippa was the daughter of John of Gaunt and in 1387 she married King João I, thereby sealing the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, which is said to be the longest standing political alliance still in effect between two nations today. It was also here in the Church grounds that the English chap we met, who was bereft because of the UK’s Brexit vote, told us that he’d got talking to an English ‘Ex-pat’ who he said lived permanently here on Madeira. He asked this expat fellow how he had voted in the referendum and the expat told him he’d very firmly voted for leaving the EU. “But why?” our new-found friend asked, and the expat replied that he was “fed up of bluddy foreigners coming to the UK to use the health service for free.” And so our friend asked him if, as a British long-term resident of Madeira, he always flew back to the UK when he got ill, or did he use the local doctors service here on Madeira? – Of course, he used the medical services there on Madeira, he replied somewhat baffled; clearly he couldn’t see the irony in this cognitive dissonance, nor the fact that he himself was as much an EU immigrant as a British ‘expat.’

As Bowles noted in 1959: “Certainly Madeira is a quiet place. It is too remote to feel the emotional impact of the world events, and too small to create much agitation of its own. Life on such an island is necessarily tranquil. But Madeirans somehow manage to get a great deal of pleasure out of that life, in spite of the isolation of which they complain.” I can’t help wondering how the British expats living on Madeira are faring now and whether or not their tranquillity has been upset by the need for new paperwork and visas given that Britain has at long last firmly thrown off the burdensome shackles of its former privileges, such as ‘freedom of movement’ and the right to live unhindered in any one of the 27 EU member states, including Portugal and Madeira? – Perhaps now they are beginning to discover that ‘leave means leave’ for real and in ways which they might not have expected?

Jardim Botânico e Loiro Parque

Azulejos, Jardim Tropical Monte Palace

“Here and there on the forested slopes, two or three thousand feet above the city, are several parks. One of these is a former private estate which is thrown open to the public on certain days. […] The park itself was splendid – a great bright cape of stairways and gardens and balustrades spread out across the lap of the mountain. I had the feeling there were flowers everywhere: on the ground, in the trees, in the arms of passers-by.” Like Bowles before us, we too went to the top of the hills overlooking Funchal, but unlike him – he took a bus – we rode up the hillside on the ‘Teleférico’, or cable car, in order to explore the botanical gardens. The ‘Jardim Botânico e Loiro Parque’ used to be the estate of the English hoteliers, the Reid family, wine merchants who built the luxurious Palace Hotel in 1877, and which stands looking over the sea on the other side of Funchal, still welcoming a rarefied clientele to this day. The botanical garden is filled with both indigenous and imported plants including palms, bromeliads, succulents as well as medicinal plants, and many beautiful flowers, including orchids. The old house contains a rather old-fashioned museum of Madeiran natural history, with simple displays of pressed flora and stuffed fauna, as well as a collection of fossils.

The Quinta do Palheiro, which I suspect might be the unnamed ‘park’ which Bowles is referring to, was first laid out in 1790 by a French landscape designer for the Conde de Carvalhal. A 30-acre estate, it was later redesigned as a park in the style of an English garden, and so became a curious mix of English and French horticulture. It was bought by the English family named Blandy in 1885, like the Reids they were prominent wine merchants, profiting from the export of Blandy’s Madeira Wine. In 1936 they took over the running of Reid’s Palace Hotel, until they sold it to an international hotel chain in 1996.

Although we were aiming for it, we didn’t make it quite so far as the Quinta do Palheiro as we spent a leisurely part of the long afternoon exploring the leafy shade of the ‘Jardim Tropical Monte Palace’ instead; which is filled with cascades of water, sculptures and ‘azulejos’ – distinctive decorative blue and white tiled panels, here depicting the history of Portugal. When this eventually closed, we climbed up the hill to see the Church of Nossa Senhora do Monte.

Nossa Senhora do Monte

This rather modest little church houses the sarcophagus of the Austro-Hungarian Emperor, Karl I. The last of the Habsburg dynasty, dethroned, he died in exile here on Madeira in 1922. He was beatified by Pope John Paul II in 2004, in recognition of his efforts as a devout Christian peacemaker in the wake of World War I. The church is also a popular site of pilgrimage due to the story that during the fifteenth century a young girl, a local shepherdess, is said to have experienced several visions of the Virgin Mary in the woods nearby. The current Baroque-style church was rebuilt in 1818 after the previous church was severely damaged during an earthquake in 1748. A Pietà set in silver in the high altar survives from the previous church. The church itself sits atop an impressive flight of 68 stone steps and commands an expansive view of Funchal and the bay looking towards Cabo Girão. At the foot of these steps you can hitch a ride on one of Funchal’s famous basket sleds.

These wicker toboggans are a tradition which date back to the nineteenth century. The patrons sit in the spacious basket while two burly Madeiran men act as both drivers and brakemen, as Bowles describes: “The two men will run rapidly along beside you, exerting all their strength to hold the contraption back as it gathers momentum, and straining like dray horses to pull it ahead along the flatter portions of the course.” The distance they cover down the steep slopes is around two kilometres and the toboggans can get up to a speed of around 30 kms in some places. The main thrills of the ride come from the combination of speed and the hazardous feeling that the toboggan might tip up or collide with one of the walls which line the road, or that you might catch up catastrophically quickly with the braking toboggan in front of you. The fact that the speeding toboggans cross some quite busy roads with cars driving on them too (although these crossings are watched over by safety marshals), with the cars’ bumpers at about eye-level with you, is also quite disconcerting.

Wicker Basket Sled Ride

The steep slope of the basket sled ride is nothing compared to some of the roads of the island’s interior. It’s well worth taking some time to explore Madeira beyond Funchal, to get a taste of the island’s wild topography, its verdant hills and stony cliffs with waterfalls plunging straight down to the rugged coastline. Bowles describes it best: “For a moment it looks like a very expensive production of ‘Götterdämmerung.’ From here on the voyage is down and up, across valleys and along the edges of cliffs. You swing around a curve and are poised above a village some two thousand feet below. A half hour later the bus rocks through its main street; the church bell is clanging in the steeple as you bump across the sunlit ‘praça.’ There are stops where it is so quiet that from your seat you hear the water gurgling in the ‘levada’ beside the road. And when you finally arrive, you have a very clear sensation of being somewhere else, not so much in place as in time.”

There is certainly something ruggedly elemental about the rocky coastline and the high interior scarps of the island; an outpost in the Atlantic, located far enough away from the coast of Africa to feel truly isolated, as any decent island should make one feel – far from home, far from the familiar, far away from the rest of the world. For me at least, despite all its touristy aspects – with its comfortable hotels, and relaxing restaurants, all providing welcome retreats – there is also something of the eternal about Madeira. For me that’s what Bowles means when he describes that sensation of “being somewhere else” not just in place but also in time.

For me, sitting in the gorgeous old cathedral, the Catedral Sé, in the centre of Funchal, looking up at its wonderfully antique ceiling (which reminds me of the elaborate ceilings of the ‘Alcazar’ at Segovia), seeing the large Chinese vases flanking the altars in the side chapels (wondering how and when they first came to be placed there), all serve to remind you of the long history of this place stretching back to the days of Henry ‘the Navigator’ and beyond, back into the elemental days when this sharpened volcanic rock first rose up out of the ocean, and, swathed in white mist, began to be seeded by the lush, verdant vegetation which made it a rounded little world impenetrable and imponderable in itself. For me, having long imagined it, now that I was finally here, Madeira was a place which I felt just as much as a place which I saw and experienced. And this is the mysterious magic of Madeira; it is a place which lives long and dwells deep within you.

As our plane lifted us back up into the vast dome of the blue sky, carrying us away, we looked down upon this small remarkable ocean-bounded island, now slowly receding from us, set amidst the heaving dark waters of the Atlantic, I felt myself akin to both the place seen far below for this last time, and to Bowles’s concluding words about it: “You know now that such a place exists and that you can get back to it someday if you want to, and it is satisfying to have that certainty.”