We have barely left Funchal, The capital of this little pearl that a prehistoric eruption brought to light in the middle of Atlantic, When our rented car begins its daily climbing on impossible uneven roads. After each curve, And do not believe that there are many, Another slope appears more absurd than the previous. After all, engineers must have thought, Who needs curves if you can put straight roller mountain format?
Half an hour and three tons of stress later, When we finally stop at the Pico de Arieiro parking lot, What are we going to visit, I listen to an exclamation: "Look, We are above the clouds!”. Normal, I think. And we will not have burned the wings, as Icarus, narrowly. And more scares thinking about the descent. If one day I live in Madeira, I will mount a brake factory.
Sword -cut cliffs, Prehistoric endemic plants, clouds that open step to a vision of the ocean that impresses
Joking apart, The landscape is intoxicating. As we have passed, In just two rats, of a sunny day to a closed winter and round fog, After crossing the sea of ??clouds, to the Sun of Justice.
But that's not all. The walk that awaits us, which communicates two of the highest peaks on the island, close to the 2.000 meters, It is not suitable for vertigo patients or stendhal syndrome. Sword -cut cliffs, Prehistoric endemic plants, clouds that open step to a vision of the ocean that impresses. I think so, Like me now, Núñez de Balboa must have felt when he became the first western to pose his eyes in the Pacific. Then I remember the six million tourists who have passed through, two or three thousand of whom are shoulder shoulder with me at this time, And my adventurous warmth.
Madeira, Discovered by Joao Zarco at the dawn of the fifteenth century, It is an island that lives for tourism, that nourishes the 30% of GDP and in which two out of ten inhabitants are used. But, This was not always like that. In his early stages after the Portuguese discovery, The island became one of the world's world producers of sugar, exported to everyone.
Then business diversified, Taking agriculture, Especially from Viñedo, The Sugar Relay. The wooden vines They became known worldwide. Even more when it was discovered that the long journey by sea not only did not harm it, but they did well, and The English massively brought him to their American colonies. Apparently, There are reliable sources who claimed in their day that when the United States Congress signed its declaration of independence the famous 4 July 1776, It was with Madeira wine with which the Washington gave, Jefferson, Franklin and company.
There are reliable sources who claimed in their day that when the United States Congress signed its declaration of independence the famous 4 July 1776, It was with Madeira wine with which the Washington gave, Jefferson, Franklin and company
And they are not the parents of Uncle Sam's homeland the only relevant characters linked to Madeira. Next to the Santa Catarina Park, In the center of Funchal, a statue dedicated to SIA, The Great Empress of Europe, that spent a long season in the second half of the nineteenth century in its fight against respiratory problems. This He gave great notoriety to the island as a destination for health and luxury for the European aristocracy, And it was the departure pistol of a tourist explosion that has already been unstoppable since the mid -twentieth century.
A Sisi's grandson, Charles I, sad protagonist of the history books for being the last emperor of Austro-Hungary, He died exiled in Madeira in 1922. And The Polyphacetic Winston Churchill has a beautiful collection of paintings painted on the banks of the island.
But, certainly, The proper name that the popular imaginary associates Madeira is that of Cristiano Ronaldo. He does not need a presentation because football is on our planet what fals faster spread after light, And man has been making goals of all colors two decades.
How is such a controversial character, We decided to do a survey of walking around your figure. So, In each restaurant, in each tourist place, In each bar ... we released the question: And Cristiano Ronaldo how about? Is the island with him? There was unanimity in two conclusions. The first: Everyone thinks that Cristiano falls badly to many, But they assure that they don't, that precisely they like them. Some even boast of recognizing how much good has made his figure to the island, And they emphasize how prone to spend their money on helping those in need ...
They stand out (of CR7) I prone what it is to spend your money on helping those in need ...
The second conclusion is that Cristiano will be whatever ... but his family ... ay what to do with his family! All of her, also; mother, sisters, cousins ??... They are ticks that take the blood and live to the drummers without giving a stick to the water and walking around the island with airs of greatness. Madeirenses dixit.
The beaches…
Resolved the dilemma, And thanking Cristiano Ronaldo for the amount of excuses he gave us to approach the bar of a bar and ask us for a very cold coral (Sparkling and body, the local cerveza, certainly), You have to comment on another of the great sensations of an island that, over 260 kilometers of coastline, It barely has seven or eight beaches ... to call them in some way.
As a good volcanic island, The vast majority of its coast is a cliff belt -that of Girao is the highest, with almost 600 Metro above sea level- where basaltos and solidified lavas predominate. The only sand beach in which you can bathe does not reach the width of my cat's sand. A disaster. Nothing to do with the paradise with whom one dreams when he thinks of going on vacation to an island in the middle of the ocean ...
An island that, over 260 kilometers of coastline, It barely has seven or eight beaches ... to call them in some way.
And one tends to think that it should be smarter and have known before something as basic as in Madeira there is nowhere to swim beyond the pool ... but when, After the first day, We appeared in the hotel dining room dresses of mountaineers willing to explore everything and we saw breakfast to those beautiful couple with their beach sets and beach attitude, We could not avoid those airs of superiority of the bad travelers who give them aware for what they discovered a while ago.
Yes indeed… To compensate for beaches dislikes, The capricious nature gave the island a few natural pools, Originally formed by solidified volcanic lava who created pools in contact with the sea, and that, Despite having been adapted for human comfort, They retain their natural and safe attraction for bathroom. The most famous are north, In Porto Moniz and Seixal. We attest that it is a most pleasant bathroom.
Now, If the door was semi closed for bathers in Madeira, The windows opened par for nature lovers. For summarizing it: It is not easy to conceive such beautiful things in such a short land space. Because Madeira is a relatively small island, It doesn't take time to travel too much, but that hides inside secrets unthinkable. The crest that runs through the peaks of Arieiro and Ruivo is one of them that we already commented.
But there are many more. There is a route that cuts the central massif like a knife, crossing his valley for a laurisilva forest of such lush and so little corsed by man, that one has the feeling of having traveled back in time when he enters into it. So much so, that UNESCO declared him a World Heritage in 1999.
For hiking lovers the whole island is a party
For hiking lovers the whole island is a party. There are very massive routes -because its beauty is extreme- How La del Caliro Verde, or that of the 25 sources. But others that do not require too much skill and come with the gift of being little busy.…
The flowers…
And if hiking is crazy, For plant fans and, especially, The flowers, The island is like a huge attraction park. I, that I am lucky to travel with a botany without title, I could not stop smiling when I was permanently informed of the existence of trees, plants and, especially, flowers that, so is, With great difficulty and work they are grown in Spain but that, EN Madeira, They grow wild everywhere; huge, of all colors, With fruits that exceed the logic of size and shapes.
We saw grow at the edges of the Agapanthus road, plumerias, Birds of Paradise, Bromelias, jacarandas, Adam ribs with gigantic edible fruits, heliconias, Kahili ginger and native orchids of the island. In my partner's words in ecstasy: "It's like mixing the flora of the north and southern, All of them lush and twinned in the Atlantic ".
«It's like mixing the flora of the north and southern, All of them lush and twinned in the Atlantic »
In fact, And although everything could be seen naturally and spontaneously, There are several botanical gardens on the island, one of them of a size almost similar to the removal of Madrid, where hundreds of types of flowers and different trees are grown.
It should only be noted, To close, that also on the island of Madeira there is enormous aquatic sports tourism -surely to compensate for the lack of beaches -. Can, With a little time and a lot of economic resources, rent a canoe, go by boat to discover the marine environment, Mounting in a caravel like the ones Columbus used to discover America to Europeans, or make snorkel and diving.
And, Although I must confess that we did not get any experience from that, There is also a luxury tourism with immense and exclusive hotels and restaurants in which to eat and try all kinds of broths in care and extraordinary gardens.
The success of a vacation is not wanting to end. It is difficult to get the idea of ??leaving Madeira. To help us, We get involved, The last night, In music, Stars and Poncha, That drink from here that mixes orange and lemon juice, honey and sugarcane brandy ... And that has the charm of the sweetness and instinct of the murderers of neurons.
On the plane back home you feel something strange. You don't even know how to explain a place that is not a beach retreat, Not a mountain range, Not a tropical garden, Not a mountain in which to get lost on steep roads, nor the site where the winds die, Not even the land of the old sweet wines, nor the place where you walk on the clouds. Madeira is all that at the same time.
