Europe > Portugal > Madeira > Funchal > Tropical Paradise > Articles > Madeira’s Floating Garden

Black bullwhips. That’s what they look like, these long black fishy strips glistening in the morning sun, dangling over marble slabs at the market in Funchal. When you buy one, the fishmonger rolls it into a hoop and stuffs its tail in its mouth like a Celtic knot work beasty from the Book of Kells. If I hadn’t tasted one on a skewer with peppers and onions before seeing what it looked like, I wouldn’t go near it with a pitchfork.

“No one has ever seen one alive,” Miguel remarks as we gape at the enormous glassy, bloated eyes and rapier teeth that could pass for vampire fangs. The espada - scabbard fish - the national dish of Madeira, lives at the extraordinary depth of 2,600 feet below the sea. By the time the hardy island fishermen pull up their mile-long lines, the eel-like fish are dead from the decompression.

I’ve begun this island ode with black whips just to get your attention. But it’s really not fair. Though the espada has an evil eye, and Madeira’s rocky coastline is treacherous, its mountainous terra firma is sublime. Botanists go bananas - and pomegranates and papaws - here. More than 700 indigenous and 120 endemic species grow on Madeira, and grow to phenomenal proportions. There are 1,000-year-old giant heather bushes 40 feet high. The eerie dragon tree - a Medusa with snarled serpentine branches as thick as boa constrictors, and a sap yielding a red dye known as dragon's blood.

Madeira’s rich red wine will make you drunk. But so will its opiate breezes laced with oleander and roses, and its fruity reverie of pomegranates, tangerines and mangos, loquats and quince. In this floating garden intoxicated with light, flowers glow supernaturally and leaves glint like emeralds.

Drag out the P word. That shameless tourist cliché -“paradise.” Madeira’s levada walks are a paradise for hikers, and comparable to trekking in China for scenic mountain highs. The vertical landscapes here drive you dizzy. Cabo Girao, a stupefying 1,900-foot drop, is the second-highest sea cliff in the world. The short airport runway (regarded as the most dangerous in the world) is hoisted onto concrete pylons sunk into the sea. Madeira’s towns and villages are securely fastened to the coast. But its roads through the interior - crazy squiggles on the map - cling like barnacles to the cliffs. And on the steeply terraced fields evocative of Machu Pichu, representing millions of hours of human toil, even the vegetables get vertigo. But the 260,000 Madeirans who live on this vertiginous hunk jutting up 20,000 feet from the seabed are a sure-footed race.

Which brings us to the questions of beaches. Although you can leap straight into the ocean from various Madeiran hotels for a refreshing dip, most people in search of beach head for Porto Santo. The silken sands on this island, a 90-minute ferry ride away, are said to have curative properties. But the three other islands in this archipelago, Zlheu Chao, Deserta Grande and Bugio are inhospitable and uninhabited but for colonies of ferocious poisonous black spiders.

I like to imagine, like some islanders, that Madeira is a resurrected chunk of the lost continent of Atlantis sunk west of the Straits of Gibraltar 80,000 years ago. Or a fragment of Lemuria, the vanished land linking Madagascar to India and Sumatra in another age. The Ice Age never touched it, so it preserves the remnants of the tropical rain forest and the climate that central and southern Europe enjoyed in the early Cenozoic a million years ago - a five-month long (70°F) spring and a seven-month long (80°F) summer, with Canary Ocean currents warming the sea to 61-68°F.

This marooned Portuguese island is closer to Casablanca, Morocco on the African coast 340 miles away than it is to Lisbon, 611. Madeira's soul is Mediterranean. Its culture is decidedly European. Its history and commerce are markedly British, and its mentality 100 per cent island. I’m lucky to have Miguel Jardim, who comes from an old Madeiran wine family and knows his Sercial, Verdelho, Boal and Malmsey, to show (and drive) me around. His dignified English accent is not out of place here. Although Madeira is an autonomous region of Portugal, the English presence is pervasive. The old Reid's Hotel, where tuxedos at dinner are still de rigueur, epitomizes the genteel life of the British who sojourned here enroute from Africa and India in the 19th century, George Bernard Shaw and Winston Churchill among them.

Miguel drives his cousin’s lurching jeep like an old safari hand. On Madeira car rentals are reasonably priced, but when driving here is a stunt adventure, many visitors take taxis or island buses. I learned the first rule of the road a few miles out of the capital Funchal (“Wild Fennel”) which looks like a Greek coliseum set into the hillside, with whitewashed houses pitched in rows facing the spectacle of the sea. Christopher Columbus lived here for a few years after his marriage to Madeiran Dona Filipa Moniz, but Madeirans don't make a big deal of it. One of his houses was unceremoniously torn down.

After lurching up a narrow road so steep it felt like our jeep could flip-flop over and slide downhill on its roof, we had to lurch back down with a wheezing banana truck in our face. Rule number one: what goes up a steep twisty one-lane Madeiran road must sometimes come back down backwards. In Madeira the vehicle coming down the hill always has the right-of-way. Especially ten-ton trucks.

Madeiran roads are remarkable feats of construction, allowing traffic to average a steady 12 miles an hour. Fortunately for visitors, Madeira's bus system transports people and what-have-you from one end of the 286 square mile, 6,107-foot high volcanic island to the other at remarkably reliable intervals. Buses are a cheap, sociable way to access the dozens of scenic walks along the narrow levadas, Madeira's unique watercourses.

Madeira's lushness partly depends on its elaborate irrigation system of over 1,350 miles of levadas, which channel water from the wet northern and central regions to terraced farms in the arid south. The footpaths along these narrow aqueducts, built five centuries ago by Moorish slaves, make spectacularly scenic, if sometimes harrowing, hiking trails. Some levada walks politely meander beside grassy knolls, mossy ravines, carpets of wild oats and barley, through virgin forests of heath and laurel, fields of poppies and thistles, fruit orchards and banana and sugarcane plantations. Others rudely skirt sheer drops of 1,300 feet, skim escarpments, chasms, and abysses, and pass through dark tunnels, under waterfalls and over diabolically slippery red clay.

In their meticulously detailed guide to driving and walking around Madeira, ‘Landscapes of Madeira’, John and Pat Underwood describe the challenges of certain levada walks. Of the Ponta de Sao Lourenco levada, they advise: “It's particularly difficult for the short of leg to find footholds, especially when contemplating the foaming jaws of death below… Hang on to the trees while making this very steep descent.”

I could have walked for weeks along the levadas, soothed by the aromatherapy of the hundreds of flowery scents, the shifting light and shade, the sound of coursing water, and the pure Zen of the scenery. But there was Madeiran wine to taste and Fado music to sob over.

Miguel took me to the Casa dos Vizihos da Madeira of the old Madeira wine family company of Henriques & Henriques to taste some Sercial, Verdelho, Boal and Malmsey. During a few hours of heady sipping among venerable aged-oak casks, I learned all about, and forgot all about, how Madeira’s wine is made. And I listened to various conflicting versions of how Madeira's human history began, with a wayward vessel:

English adventurer Robert Machim and his lover Anne d'Arfet fled Bristol, England, in 1346. Either he was a nobleman and she was his concubine of lower station, or she was from a noble family who refused to let her marry a mere knight. Machim and his mistress and crew sailed for Portugal - or maybe that was France - but a storm blew them off course and they ended up on Madeira. The crew mutinied. Anne took ill and died. And Machim died three days later of a broken heart.

Fado is Portugal’s answer to Country & Western, Miguel says. But I really think it’s more tragic, like the Blues. At the Restaurante a Seta in Monte, a short, steep taxi ride from Funchal, visitors can “enjoy” this sweaty, passionate Portuguese tradition, along with a traditional Espetada-on-a-skewer dinner. Fado-lovers love misery. Even when it’s sung badly, off key and in a gravelly voice, Fado’s haunting erratic and aberrant vocal undulations inspired by Flamenco and Arab singing, and its tragic lyrics are said to plunge its listeners into an emotional stupor, wallowing in sadness, grief over unrequited love and betrayal, and lust for revenge.

And here’s where those black whips come in.

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