Madeira

• 1. Introduction

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  Plutarch, in his Parallel Lives, tells of sailors who met the Roman commander Quintus Sertorius after returning to Cádiz. They spoke of idyllic islands far out in the Atlantic. Plutarch records their description: "The islands are said to be two in number separated by a very narrow strait and lie 10,000 furlong from Africa. They are called the Isles of the Blessed." Whether those sailors meant Madeira is unknown, but the real archipelago has a story at least as strange.

  Madeira is an autonomous region of Portugal in the North Atlantic, about 805 km southwest of the mainland. It lies just under 400 km north of the Canary Islands and 520 km west of Morocco. Geologically it rests on the African Tectonic Plate, yet its people are mostly descended from Portuguese settlers. There were 251,060 of them in 2021, and roughly half live in the capital, Funchal, on the south coast of the main island.

  Three questions run through this documentary. Who first set foot on these empty islands, and what did they find there? How did sugar and then wine turn a volcanic outcrop into a stop on the busiest European trade routes? And why do so many Madeirans now live in places as distant as Hawaii and Venezuela?

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• 2. Legends And Landfall

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  Archaeological evidence hints that Vikings may have reached the islands sometime between 900 and 1030. A second clue comes from Muhammad al-Idrisi, who wrote of the Mugharrarin, a name meaning the adventurers, seafarers from Lisbon. They landed on an island with a huge quantity of sheep, but the meat was bitter and inedible, so they sailed on to the more populated Canary Islands. That island may have been Madeira or Hierro. Either way, people must have come before, because livestock needs someone to bring it.

  A legend from the reign of King Edward III of England names two lovers, Robert Machim and Anna d'Arfet. They were said to have fled from England to France in 1346. A violent storm drove their ship off course and onto the shore of an island that may have been Madeira. The town of Machico is said to take its name from the young lovers.

  Medieval maps and manuscripts also carry traces of the islands. The Book of Knowledge of All Kingdoms from the early 14th century mentions them, as do the Medici-Laurentian Atlas of 1351, the Soleri Portolani of 1380 and 1385, and the Corbitis Atlas from the late 14th century. The names vary widely, from Lecmane and Lolegname to Legnami, the isle of wood. It is widely accepted that people knew of these Atlantic islands before their better-documented discovery by Portugal.

  In 1418 two captains, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, were exploring the African coast for Prince Henry the Navigator. A storm drove them off course to an island they named Porto Santo, meaning holy harbour, in gratitude for escaping a shipwreck. The next year they organised a new expedition with Bartolomeu Perestrello, claimed Porto Santo for the Portuguese Crown and founded a settlement. There the settlers noticed "a heavy black cloud suspended to the southwest." They investigated and found a much larger island, which they called Madeira. The archipelago was the first territorial discovery of the Age of Discovery.

  The first Portuguese settlers arrived around 1420 or 1425. Zarco, Vaz Teixeira and Perestrello were knights of the Order of Christ, and each governed one of three captaincies: Funchal, Machico and Porto Santo, respectively. By order of King João I, colonisation began in 1425 with people of modest means, former prisoners and lower-ranking nobles. Fishermen and peasant farmers also left willingly. They hoped for a better life than the mainland offered after the Black Death, where nobles controlled the best farmland.

  The early settlers lived mostly on fish and vegetables. They then grew wheat for themselves and began exporting it to mainland Portugal. But grain would not remain the island's main crop for long.

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• 3. Sugar And Slavery

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  Falling wheat harvests pushed Prince Henry the Navigator to order new commercial crops, so that the islands could turn a profit. The answer was sugar. After the first water-driven sugar mill appeared, production rose past 6,000 arrobas by 1455, an arroba being 11 to 12 kg. Advisers came from Sicily, and Genoese money financed the expansion. Genoa stayed part of the island economy until the 17th century. Genoese and Flemish traders were drawn by the chance to bypass Venetian monopolies.

  By 1480 some seventy ships from Antwerp were engaged in the Madeira sugar trade, and Antwerp became the centre for refining and distribution. By the 1490s Madeira had overtaken Cyprus as a sugar producer. Funchal grew prosperous and became a required stop on European trade routes. Adventurers and merchants flocked there, especially Italians, Basques, Catalans and Flemish.

  Around 1506 the sugar boom peaked, and enslaved workers were critical to it. They laboured in the cane fields and the mills. They also built and maintained the levadas, the irrigation channels that remain among the most distinctive features of the Madeiran landscape. The first enslaved people were Guanches from the nearby Canary Islands and convicts exiled from mainland Portugal, known as Degredados. They did not survive long in the harsh conditions. By the 1490s, 2000 Africans were cutting cane.

  During the 16th century their numbers on Madeira declined, because the industry they had helped pioneer moved to São Tomé and Príncipe. It then spread to much larger plantations in Brazil, the Guianas and the West Indies. Madeira itself became a victim of the slave trade in 1617, when Barbary corsairs carried off 1,200 people from Porto Santo. The island still kept chattel slavery until 1775 or 1777, after it had been abolished in the Kingdom of Portugal.

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• 4. Wine And Visitors

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  In the 18th century vineyards replaced the sugar plantations, and English merchants came to dominate the wine trade. They bought estates, built houses in Funchal and shipped wine to Britain, the West Indies and the North American colonies. Tradition holds that the Founding Fathers of the United States raised glasses of Madeira in a toast to the Declaration of Independence.

  During the Age of Exploration, ships bound for the New World or the East Indies routinely stopped at Madeira. To keep the wine from spoiling, producers added neutral grape spirits. Then an unsold shipment returned to the islands after a round trip, and its flavour had been transformed by heat and movement. Today the wine is made by deliberately heating it and allowing some oxidation. The European Union grants it Protected designation of origin status, and most countries limit the name to wine from the islands. The cake that English bakers call Madeira cake takes its name from the wine.

  British troops first occupied the island in 1801, and the arrival was amicable. Colonel William Henry Clinton became governor, and a detachment of the 85th Regiment of Foot under Lieutenant-colonel James Willoughby Gordon garrisoned it. After the Peace of Amiens the troops withdrew in 1802. They reoccupied Madeira in 1807 and stayed until the Peninsular War ended in 1814. In 1856 British troops recovering from cholera were stationed in Funchal, along with widows and orphans of soldiers killed in the Crimean War.

  James Julius Wood wrote a series of seven sketches of the island in 1846. The first tourist guide followed in 1850, covering history, geology, flora, fauna and customs. The British and Germans were the first to launch a Madeiran hotel chain, and Reid's New Hotel opened in 1891. It is now the Belmond Reid's Palace and is still open. Early tourism depended on the supposed healing qualities of the climate. When surer treatments for tuberculosis were found in the twentieth century, visitor numbers fell off sharply.

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• 5. War, Exile And Revolt

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  On the 3rd of December 1916 a German U-boat, U-38, slipped into Funchal harbour. It torpedoed and sank three ships, then bombarded Funchal for two hours from about 2 mi away. Batteries on the island returned fire and eventually forced the submarine to withdraw. On the 12th of December 1917 two more U-boats, SM U-156 and SM U-157, shelled the city again. Three people were killed and 17 wounded, and several houses and the Santa Clara church were hit.

  The last Austrian Emperor and King of Hungary, Charles I, was exiled to Madeira after the war. The Council of Allied Powers chose the island because it was isolated in the Atlantic and easily guarded, which would help prevent any attempt to restore him to his thrones. He died there on the 1st of April 1922. His coffin lies in a chapel of the Church of Our Lady of Monte.

  Portugal stayed neutral in World War II but kept ties with Britain dating from the Treaty of Windsor of 1386. As a result Madeira took in 2,000 evacuees from Gibraltar. Many, fondly remembered as Gibraltinos, married locally and stayed on after the war. Some 200 were Jewish. In Funchal they found a Jewish cemetery that belonged to the Abudarham family, the same family that gave its name to the Abudarham Synagogue in Gibraltar.

  Between the wars, the Great Depression found the island already in a long economic crisis. When the national government took control of imported grain, the price of flour and bread rose dramatically, and strikes and riots broke out. In April 1931 the island's garrison joined a military uprising against the government of the National Dictatorship. Forces sent from the mainland crushed it, but only after seven days of fighting.

  After the Carnation Revolution of 1974 in Lisbon, a purported independence movement appeared. Over the next four years the Madeira Archipelago Liberation Front, known as FLAMA, carried out around 200 bomb attacks on the island, with one fatality. It may have reflected some regional elites reacting against the rise of the political left, more than any real ethnic or separatist feeling. The 1976 Constitution gave Madeira an autonomous administration with its own legislature.

  Today a Representative of the Republic, appointed by the President of the Republic, signs regional decrees or vetoes laws that are unconstitutional. Before the sixth constitutional amendment of 2006 the post was held by a more powerful Minister of the Republic. The Legislative Assembly is elected by universal suffrage using the D'Hondt method of proportional representation.

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• 6. The Diaspora

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  Today about 350,000 Madeirans and their descendants live in South Africa, and about 200,000 in Venezuela. Emigration to Africa and the Americas was a long-established pattern, and hardship pushed it faster. In the 21st century many of those communities have sent returnees back to the island. Other Madeirans settled in the United States, Brazil, Guyana, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago.

  In the famine of 1846, over 6,000 islanders migrated to British Guiana, and by 1891 they made up 4.3% of its population. In 1902 about 5,000 Portuguese people, mostly Madeirans, lived in Honolulu, Hawaii. By 1910 that number had grown to 21,000. Their cargo included musical instruments. The ukulele was created in the 1880s from two small guitar-like Madeiran instruments, the cavaquinho and the rajão. Three Madeiran cabinet makers, Manuel Nunes, José do Espírito Santo and Augusto Dias, are generally credited as the first makers. Two weeks after they stepped off the SS Ravenscrag in late August 1879, the Hawaiian Gazette reported: "Madeira Islanders recently arrived here, have been delighting the people with nightly street concerts."

  In the late 1830s the Scottish physician and Presbyterian minister Robert Reid Kalley stopped at Funchal on his way to a mission in China, so that his wife could recover from an illness. They stayed. He began preaching the Protestant gospel and converting islanders from Catholicism, and he was arrested and imprisoned. Another Scottish missionary, William Hepburn Hewitson, took up the work. By 1846 about 1,000 Protestant Madeirans faced discrimination and mob violence. They answered a call for sugar plantation workers and left for Trinidad, where the unfamiliar tropical climate and serious money troubles defeated them.

  In 1848 the American Protestant Society raised money and sent Reverend Manuel J. Gonsalves, a Baptist minister born in Madeira and a naturalised American citizen, to work with Reverend Arsénio da Silva. Da Silva had emigrated with the exiles but died in early 1849. Later that year Gonsalves escorted the exiles to Sangamon and Morgan counties in Illinois, on land bought with the society's funds. Accounts state that between 700 and 1,000 arrived.

  The city of New Bedford is especially rich in Madeirans. It hosts the Museum of Madeira Heritage and the annual Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, the world's largest celebration of Madeiran heritage, which draws tens of thousands to Madeira Field. In Venezuela, figures from the 1990s show that around 70% of the Portuguese diaspora were Madeirans and their descendants. They began in agriculture and later concentrated on commerce in the big cities. Madeirans founded the supermarkets Central Madeirense, Excelsior Gama, Supermercados Unicasa and Automercados Plaza, and the Venezuelan state of Portuguesa is named for its large Portuguese population.

  The flow now runs both ways. At the end of 2022, immigrants on Madeira totalled 11,793, up 13.3% from 2021. Venezuelans, many of Portuguese origin, formed the largest group at 19.7%.

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• 7. Fire, Forest And Water

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  Madeira Island is the summit of a shield volcano that rises about 6 km from the floor of the Atlantic. Building began about 5 million years ago, in the Miocene, and continued until roughly 700,000 years ago. Erosion then carved two large amphitheatres opening to the south, and later eruptions piled scoria cones and lava flows on top. The latest eruptions came 6,500 years ago, in the west-central part of the island.

  Pico Ruivo, at 1862 m, crowns a ridge that runs down the middle of the island, while the eastern end stays below 200 metres. The island is 57 km long, about 22 km across at its widest, and covers 741 square kilometres. Sea cliffs such as Cabo Girão and deep ravines spread out from the central spine, leaving the interior largely inaccessible. Daily life gathers in villages at the mouths of the ravines, where the heavy autumn and winter rains run to the sea.

  Porto Santo covers 42.5 square kilometres. The three Desertas islands, Deserta Grande, Bugio and Ilhéu de Chão, total 14.2 and are uninhabited. The Savage Islands lie 280 km south-southeast of Madeira, with three main uninhabited islands, 16 islets and a total area of 3.6 square kilometres.

  At the Funchal weather station the average annual temperature is 19.6 C for 1981-2010. The Gulf Stream and the Canary Current keep temperatures mild to warm all year. The Madeira Natural Park can receive as much as 2800 mm of rain a year, while flat Porto Santo has a semiarid climate. Snow falls on the mountains in most winters.

  The name madeira means wood in Portuguese, and the first settlers lit fires to clear land for farming. In the south, little of the original subtropical rainforest survives. Native laurisilva trees still fill valleys in the north, and the forests on the northern slopes are a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The paleobotanical record shows that laurisilva has existed on the island for at least 1.8 million years.

  Two endemic plants, the vine Jasminum azoricum and the rowan Sorbus maderensis, are critically endangered. The Madeiran large white butterfly, an endemic subspecies that lived in the laurisilva, has not been seen since 1977. On Deserta Grande, the wolf spider Hogna ingens is critically endangered and is considered the largest member of its family. Three bird species are endemic: the Trocaz pigeon, the Madeira chaffinch and the Madeira firecrest. Extinct birds include the Madeiran scops owl, two rails, two quails and the Madeiran wood pigeon, last seen in the early 20th century. A great auk bone from the Selvagens suggests that seabird visited at least occasionally.

  Madeira is home to six chromosomal varieties of house mice. They are believed to descend from European house mice brought by Vikings in the 9th century, or possibly by Portuguese settlers in the 15th. The ancestral species has 40 chromosomes, but the Madeiran populations have between 22 and 30, with the same genes rearranged. Deep valleys separated by high ground keep the lineages apart. At least some of them probably cannot interbreed with one another or with their continental relatives.

  Stone channels called levadas, running for thousands of kilometres and dating to the fifteenth century, carry rainwater from the north to the south. They supply drinking water and farms, and they feed electricity generation. The Socorridos hydroelectric station, fed by levada water, is the island's principal hydraulic system and produces power throughout the year. A 34.7 million euro project, with 17.3 million co-financed by the European Cohesion Policy, improved water storage, including a 5.4-kilometre tunnel. It was acclaimed as one of the best EU co-funded projects at the EGIOSTAR Awards. In the first half of 2022-33% of the electricity used on Madeira came from renewable sources.

  On Porto Santo, Renault and the island's electricity company, EEM, piloted a project to show that fossil fuels could be replaced entirely by renewable energy. It relies on a 3.3 MWh battery.

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• 8. Modern Madeira

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  Madeira's gross domestic product reached nearly 7.5 billion euros in 2024, which was 2.6% of Portugal's economic output. GDP per capita was 29,012 euros, or 73% of the EU27 average. Tourism contributes 20% of the region's GDP, and hotels and restaurants account for 9% of gross value added. In 2021 the island recorded 148,000 visits from British tourists and 113,000 from Germans. Porto Santo, with its 9 km beach, is entirely devoted to tourism. Offshore, whale watching has become very popular, with sperm whales, fin whales, sei whales and many dolphin species seen near the coast.

  The Madeira International Business Centre, created in the 1980s, offers mainly tax incentives to attract investment. It has three sectors: the Industrial Free Trade Zone, the International Shipping Register and International Services. The European Commission approved the regime as legal state aid and extended it through 2027. Companies drawn by the centre provide over 40% of the regional government's corporate income tax revenue and nearly 3,000 jobs. Madeira is an Outermost Region of the European Union, which allows derogations from some EU policies. Its regional government president, Miguel Albuquerque, has also announced a business hub focused on Bitcoin, backed by an income tax exemption for Bitcoin investors.

  Public finances have been a struggle. In 2012 the regional administration was reported to owe some 6 billion euros despite a population of about 250,000. Madeira has received 2 billion euros in EU funding. The Portuguese treasury took over its debt management from 2012 to 2015. Tax revenues rose 41% between 2012 and 2016, and the deficit-to-operating-revenue ratio fell to 10% in 2016 from 77% in 2013.

  The local table follows the sea and the grill. Espada, the black scabbardfish, is usually fried in batter and served with fried banana. Espetada is beef rubbed with garlic, salt and bay leaf, marinated for 4 to 6 hours in Madeira wine, red wine vinegar and olive oil, then skewered on a bay laurel stick over smouldering wood chips. It is usually served with the local bread, bolo do caco. A special iron stand with a T-shaped end holds the long skewers, with a small plate beneath to catch the juices. At Christmas, Carne de Vinho e Alhos is associated with the pig slaughter held a few weeks before the holiday, when the whole village would attend.

  The traditional Bolo de Mel, made with mel de cana, sugarcane honey, is never cut with a knife but broken by hand. Malasadas are eaten mainly during the Carnival of Madeira. Laranjada, an orange soft drink launched in 1872, was the first soft drink produced in Portugal. The Madeira Brewery, which also dates from 1872, makes the local beer Coral. In the parish of Faial, the annual Annona Festival celebrates the cherimoya fruit in liqueurs, puddings, ice cream and smoothies.

  Football is the most popular sport, and Madeira was the first place in Portugal to host a match, organised by British residents in 1875. Cristiano Ronaldo was born on the island and played youth football for C.D. Nacional before joining Sporting CP. The Rally Vinho da Madeira has run annually since 1959, and the island hosted the 2003 World Handball Championship. The main airport carries Ronaldo's name. It offers direct flights to over 30 other airports in Europe and nearby islands, with Lisbon the most frequent destination.

  In 2025 the Madeiran band NAPA represented Portugal at the Eurovision Song Contest with the song Deslocado. It qualified ninth in the first semi-final with 56 points, then finished 21st in the grand final with 50 points.

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