6–11From Tuesday
Madeira Nature Festival
A week of guided tours, levada walks and water sports across the island and on Porto Santo.
Funchal
The island is 57 km long and 1,862 m tall
The whole island, in order
Independent planning notes for Madeira. Levada by levada, coast by coast, month by month — checked on the ground.
This week on the island
Full calendar to August 20279–11From Friday
Sea and Fisherman Fair
Machico celebrates its fishing trade: tuna and scabbardfish straight off the grill, stalls along the bay.
CaniçalMachico
10Saturday
100 Miles — Historic Rally
A regularity rally for classic cars through Machico and Santa Cruz.
Machico
After that: Madeira Canyoning Meeting · Madeira Legend RallyThe month at a glance
Latest guides
All 69
PracticalBest Madeira travel guidebooks: which one to actually buyA printed or ebook guidebook still earns its place on a Madeira trip — for offline maps on a trail with no signal, and for the kind of curated, edited overview a phone full of open tabs doesn't give you. The four names that come up for Madeira are Lonely Planet, DK Eyewitness, Rough Guides, and Marco Polo. Here's what each is actually good at.
Culture & FestivalsMadeira’s best events and festivals, and when they happenMadeira builds its calendar around a handful of recurring annual festivals, most of them free to watch on the street, with a small number of paid grandstand or venue tickets for the best views. This page covers the events themselves — for what's actually on this week or month, see the Madeira events calendar.
Hiking & LevadasMadeira’s hiking trails: the PR routes explainedMadeira has 37 official walking routes on the main island and three more on Porto Santo. Each carries a PR code and a number, each is managed by the forestry institute IFCN, and each is signposted end to end. This guide takes the eleven that carry most of the walkers — from a twenty-minute stroll to a six-and-a-half-hour traverse.About the island
Madeira measures 57 kilometres end to end and 22 across, and still it takes under an hour to get from the north coast to the south. What makes the island big is the vertical: from sea level to 1,862 metres, with the weather changing every few hundred metres of altitude.
What we write about here is everything that follows from that — which levada works in which weather, where a hire car turns into a problem, when each festival actually happens. German first, English on equal footing, no holiday-brochure prose.
Before you book
01Mountain roads are not motorway rampsThe coastal roads are new and fast. The routes into the highlands are not. Book the smallest car with a manual gearbox and you will eventually stall on an 18 percent ramp.Car hire and getting there
02Difficulty, tunnels, head torchLevada does not mean flat. Several of the well-known routes run through unlit tunnels, and without a head torch the walk ends there. The official difficulty ratings are conservative, not sporting.Levada walks
03North and south on the same dayRain in Santana and sun in Funchal is the normal case, not the exception. A forecast for "Madeira" is therefore worthless — you plan per coast and decide in the morning.Best time to visit