Drama on exotic Madeira

GO MADEIRA:If you're after stunning scenery, pretty colonial buildings and great seafood, Madeira might be for you, writes EMMA CULLINAN

LONG SHINY black fish line up like drying stockings, dangling over the edge of a table in the market in the old town of Funchal, Madeira’s capital. Known as espada, and a culinary speciality of this island, the fish were raised from deep, deep waters. Down on the seabed they are tubular creatures but the pressure of the ascent empties their stomachs and flattens their bodies. “We’re not even sure what they eat,” says one local woman, although surely someone scientific must have been down to have a look.

Many are brought ashore at the fishing village of Câmara de Lobos, which means chamber of seals, although those wide-eyed creatures swam off long ago. In this village a few kilometres west of Funchal Winston Churchill used to drink in a cafe that is now named after him and down by the water are traditional bars with tall round tables tiptoeing on the pavements outside so you can stand, drink and watch street life and dogs fighting.

Inside one bar vernacular wooden tables and floors contrast with a vast plasma screen that beams football to locals who proudly count Real Madrid’s Cristiano Ronaldo as one of their own. The barman squeezes oranges and lemons and puts them into a jug followed by slugs of local sugar-cane rum from a clear bottle with a metal cap. A wooden stick is stuck into a basin of honey to gather a runny amber ball that is released into the liquid – by being twizzled fast between expert hands. The drink is poured into glasses for us all. Bang. Poncha, the customary drink around here, is strong enough to provide entertainment for the locals when tourists drink it and display its effects fast.

Its relaxing effects make it easier to walk back up the hill through the streets lined with stepped houses. Madeira is steep, all of it. The island that sits 520km (323 miles) off the west coast of Africa, on a level with Casablanca, was made from volcanic eruptions over eons and the landscape is a distilled explosion. Much of the land that was ruched and thrust upwards during the eruptions stayed up there. Madeira is all hills – with buildings and plants blanketed over them – that rise to craggy tops, some disappearing into mist.

Flat areas by the sea are largely man-made. We land on stilts supporting a runway out into the water. A sports centre below the airstrip makes use of spare space in a way that is typical around here: every level of the multi-storey properties on the island is used.

Houses on the hills in and around Funchal have storeys that are not necessarily stacked one atop the other. A garage level can sit out from the base of a house, with a garden – often a mini banana plantation – on its roof. The house’s lower floor will be set back, looking onto it. Then an upper floor above will perhaps sit just two metres from a sheer rock face at the back. There’s no fear about building on inclines and while some gardens are terraced others just slope. In the countryside women who create the island’s famous embroidery sit out in their tilted front gardens stitching in the sun.

It’s surprising that those who discovered this island even imagined they could live here. They came from Portugal in 1419 and it was, handily, empty. “Honest m’lord, there was no-one here.”

Madeira means wood, giving an indication as to what the settlers found, and Funchal means fennel. The capital was founded in 1424 and the island has been growing its own needs since. Plants thrive in the generally sub-tropical climate that varies between the north and south of the island, and its contours. Bananas abound. They don’t grow on trees, apparently, those plants are large herbs whose fronds wave enthusiastically like a cheering green football crowd.

Then there are the vines that make Madeira wine, the sherry-like drink that was “discovered” when the wine was delivered via long sea voyages: the spirits that were added to preserve the drink, mixed with the heat and movement of the boat, gave it its distinct flavour. At Blandy’s winemakers in Funchal they age the drink in warm attics, rather than cool cellars.

Striking bunches of flowers grow all over the place and even in February we are treated to mimosa scents, fluffy balls of kapok hanging from trees, carpets of nasturtiums (making the first of its two showings a year) and birds of paradise parade their orange plumage. And there’s more: African tulip trees, yucca, white camellia, hibiscus, arum lilies, Marmalade bushes, hydrangeas and on and on.

You can brush up against them on many of the walks on the island running beside irrigation systems known as levadas. These channels were cut through land and lava from the 16th century onwards to bring water from the hilltop springs down through the farms, quenching plants as they go. Maintenance tracks beside them give walkers the opportunity to get down with nature, whether through plant-heavy woods or across open hillsides.

THE YEAR-ROUND warmth in which the island’s plants thrive also encourages tourists to the island, many of whom bask by pools in their hotel grounds.

Madeira is seen to attract the older generation but there are thrills to be had away from the world of hotel complexes and tourist-shops, such as surfing, whale watching and swimming in the rock pools at Porto Moniz on the north side of the island. Here craters scooped out of beds of lava lie just offshore (the authorities have tamed them with steps and concrete borders).

Away from the manicured municipal areas, Madeira is dramatically beautiful. En route to Porto Moniz, from Funchal, is the second highest sea-cliff in the world where you can verify your vertigo by leaning over a rail and looking waterwards. Masses of moist air rolling in from the sea condenses suddenly into a white cloud as it hits the base of the rock and it is forced up the cliff face before dissipating once again as it is freed into the atmosphere.

A house near here causes a local woman we’re with to complain that planning laws in the past were almost non-existent. While much of Madeira’s interior is building-free, in places there has been too much construction, a tour guide tells me, because everyone wants a house with a garden out front and back, and the local politicians and planners have facilitated it. Now where have we heard that before? Is it an island mentality – or human nature?

Hotels have sensibly been concentrated in one area of the capital, where most have sea views. A promenade along the ocean front takes you from here to the city centre where tourist activities mix with long-standing Madeiran life. A man sits on a quay wall fishing with a rod while a vast cruise ship looms behind him.

From here you can take a cable car up to a botanic garden or a church where you can descend in a wicker toboggan with battered wooden runners – slowly but down a functioning road. These used to take goods from the hill down to the town but are now just for fun and funds.

After you alight from your basket-case you can walk on down to the old town – with its colonial style architecture and narrow streets – and to the fruit market that sells things you won’t have known existed until now.

Behind it is the functional fish market where workers stand and plunge knives into fish to gut those that weren’t emptied by water pressure. Here those long black-skinned, white-meat espadas lie in line to be bought by locals or restaurateurs to serve to visitors who will leave this land with a taste of the dramatic and exotic from a westernised island.

* Emma Cullinan was a guest of both PAB Tours (pabtours.com, tel 01-8733411) and Sata (sata.pt) which runs holidays to the island (staying in three, four and five-star hotels) and tours of it once there. Sata flies Dublin to Funchal on Sundays (food and check-in luggage included).