Today there´s a marina for the cruisers,there´s an airport,several daily connections by fast ferry to Madeira,and the majority of people you meet are tourists. The supermarket Pingo Doce (Portuguese supermarket chain) has a huge sortiment with kiwis from New Zealand, dragon fruits from Asia and a house costs around 500.000Euros.

This development is an enormous rise of standard in only 40 years and can likely stand as an example for many places on planet earth today but it comes at a price. For local people who are not in the tourist industry it´s probably very expensive to remain on the island and imagine all infrastructure developed to keep all these services running,mainly in regards of transportation. The local environmental imprint must be enormous compared to 40 years ago and then Porto Santo is just one of many thousands of places undergoing the same development.

Attaching the capsule to plastic bottles is probably not going to make a big difference....

After some days enjoying Porto Santo we headed south for Madeira which was a daylong trip (30Nm) with dolphins as company part of the trip