{"id":103,"date":"2026-08-10T01:44:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-10T00:44:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/levada-grades-tunnels-head-torch\/"},"modified":"2026-08-10T01:44:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-10T00:44:00","slug":"levada-grades-tunnels-head-torch","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/levada-grades-tunnels-head-torch\/","title":{"rendered":"Difficulty grades, tunnels and head torches"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2>What the grade measures<\/h2>\n<p>The official rating of the waymarked routes describes exposure, surface and navigation. It does not describe how strenuous a route is. A path can run six level kilometres and still be graded hard because it follows the edge for a hundred metres without a railing.<\/p>\n<p>Conversely there are short routes with a serious climb that count as moderate because they are wide and secured. Reading the rating as a fitness measure gets it wrong \u2014 usually in the uncomfortable direction.<\/p>\n<h2>Tunnels<\/h2>\n<p>Several of the well-known routes pass through tunnels cut from the rock and left unfinished. None is lit. The height varies, the floor is wet, and water drips. Lengths run from a few metres to sections where you cannot see the far end.<\/p>\n<p>In practice: a head torch rather than a phone, because your hands need to stay free. Add something on your head \u2014 the roof is lower than it looks in the dark \u2014 and shoes that grip wet rock.<\/p>\n<h2>What else goes in<\/h2>\n<p>Rain protection even under a blue sky in Funchal, because the weather on the north side is a different weather. Enough water, because there is none on the way. And an eye on the clock: it gets dark earlier in laurel forest than in the open.<\/p>\n<p>What does not need to go in is expensive kit. The three things walks on Madeira actually fail on are missing light, the wrong shoes, and a forecast that applied to the other coast.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Levada does not mean flat, and the official difficulty rating is not about fitness. What the grades actually describe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":0,"featured_media":83,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-103","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-hiking-levadas"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/83"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/whatsonmadeira.info\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}