Fun in Funchal, 3
The Travel Deparment offered a half-day tour today of two small gardens, which I decided to skip in favour of a levada walk. We started in Quiemadas park, where this house features.
First thing I saw on the 13 kilometre hike was a Brazilian spider flower.
The levadas are man-made stone channels that carry water alongside some 2,000 kilometres of paths. The first levadas were built in the 1500s, when Portugese sailors settled the island (there were no inhabitants). The Portugese king imported sugar cane from Sicily and the first levadas were to irrigate the sugar cane.
The path along the levadas was often pretty rough, either raised tree roots or uneven stone. Very often the drop on the downhill side was vertical, so you don't want to lean away from the mountain.
Our guide helpfully told us that some hikers who fell off the trail were never found. There were lots of waterfalls.
Sometimes we walked under small waterfalls.
Most of the time we were in a laurel forest. These are Mediterranean laurels – tall trees – not the large shrubs I knew in Pennsylvania. The trees are full of lichen and both plants decant the mist in the mountains, dripping it into the soil, which feed the levadas. The system is far from rain dependent. I thought the guide said the laurels, lichen and tree heather – another new one for me – could produce 5 litres of water per hour per square metre. Unbelievable.
There were lots of tunnels. The water was so deep on the paths in some of the tunnels that we had to walk on the stone wall, bent over to protect our noggins.
This is Caldeiro Verde, at the end of the hike. After this, we retraced our steps to our starting point.
Of the 17 hikers, there were two other Americans. The rest were German or Swiss.
Pretty stunning, isn't it? Water from the levadas irrigate crops such as bananas and grapes. But the water also provides electricity and supplies drinking and shower water. While the island has only 250,000 inhabitants, more than 4 million tourists visit per year. That's a lot of showers.
After the hike, I had a little swim in the hotel pool then a shower and back into town for a nosy. I wanted a photo of the Norwegian Sea, but she sailed before I got to the quay – she's in the distance. There's a P&O boat in the middle and the Aida in the foreground.
I spoke to a couple a few days later who said the Aida can accommodate 5,200 people. Imagine!!
Cristiano Ronaldo is from Madeira – I took this photo outside a museum dedicated to him.
Final shot of the Aida.
18 November