The Voyage of Swift – Part III

 

The next island we visited was Madeira which was a five day sail from Santa Maria.  This island is quite large, 320 square miles with a population of 246K. 

We were amazed by our first sight because the island seems to rise straight up from the sea and the wind intensified as we approached the south west corner and the last hour as we rounded this was the roughest of the whole trip so far. Unfortunately photos never seem to show the size of the seas!

 

Later when we toured the island we visited the lighthouse on this corner and laughed to think of all the people ashore who had been getting a great deal of entertainment watching us bouncing around in the large sea that day we arrived. Those people you see are standing behind the lighthouse and are extremely close to the cliff edge from which there is a long straight drop to the sea below. 

 

Our first stop in Madeira was in the resort town of Calheta.  It had all we could ask for, a big marina, restaurants, and a grocery store, but the hills

 were tremendous and you couldn’t walk far without going straight up.  The picture on the left is looking down on the beach and marina from the

 hill above.  Madeira has no natural sandy beaches so this beach is manmade with sand imported from the Sahara desert, every morning there

are men brushing the sand from the walkways back onto the beach and those breakwaters are to keep the beach from disappearing,  It was

August so the beach was always very crowded.  In the second picture you can see that just beyond the shore is a sheer cliff. 

                       

They have some wonderful highways in Madeira, but we thought of Madeira as the land of a thousand tunnels because we felt that there was

more tunnel than open highway.  We could only imagine how hard it was to move about the island before the highway was built.  The roads to a

 few of the places we visited were a bit scary but the views were tremendous.

 

 

There is a lot of agriculture on the island, mostly bananas and grapes.  Grapes to make the famous Madeira wine. 

 All are grown in terraces up the sides of the hills.

In one place they have cable cars that run from the top of the cliff down to sea level so that the farmers can get down to this flat and fertile

land.  Before the cable car the farmers had to go by boat.  You can just see the cable car in this picture – it is the straight line down in the middle.

                                          

The capital of Madeira is Funchal.  We visited by car and despite the traffic think it is one of the nicest places we have seen because while it is truly a city it is not so big to be overwhelming.  The old town, although touristy had some nice restaurants and yes, another cable car.  This one went a few miles up the hill.

There was even a beach downtown next to the marina.  You can see it wasn’t very sandy but there were many people in the water and

laying on the stony beach.  There were many of these stone beaches along the cost, I guess you never had to worry about getting sand in your

shoes. The marina on the right of the picture doesn’t have much room for visitors but it is possible to moor bow or stern to the long harbor wall and you can see these boats to the left and center

After a week at one end of the island we decided to spend a few days at the other end before leaving for the Canary Islands.  The trip from

 Calheta on the southwest to Quinta da Lorde on the southeast was uneventful, in fact there wasn’t much wind so we motored along taking

 pictures of the changing clouds and landscape. You can see that there are quite a few small towns and villages along the south coast but most

people appear to live in Funchal, which is the last picture in this group of four.

 

As we traveled the short distance of 30 miles or so east to the new marina we passed the airport.  On the island there is a shortage of flat land so the airport extended out over the ocean on pillars.  I tried and tried to get a picture of a plane landing and this was the best, you can just see the plane coming in from the right.The highway goes under the airport runway and you can see a small beach on the bottom right.

Our new marina, Quinta do Lorde, was in a very quiet location.  The landscape on this corner of the island was dramatically different from the

 rest, dry and barren, but still very beautiful.  This was a spit of land that stuck out off the east and at the very end was a wonderful

trail with some great views, out to sea and straight down. 

 

The trail was supposed to be 3 miles but it seemed a lot longer as there was a lot of climbing.  At the end, which could be called the middle of

nowhere was a hut, and this wonderful path which led to the steps down to a secluded beach.  I kept wondering why the path?  It did not seem

to serve a purpose, but maybe it will in the future.

Of course there was another large hill behind the marina, and we took a hike up this, there wasn’t a lot of color at this end of the island so this

really stood out.

Everywhere progress comes, the developer who built the marina was working quickly to build this resort right next door, they worked from 8am

to 8pm, 6 days a week.  We counted six cranes in total!

In some place the stone made some odd shapes and to us it looks like a turtle, it is definitely not manmade!

 

At last it was time to leave the island and head south for Gran Canaria, so many islands, so little time!