Six nights on Madeira: levadas, the high ridge, two coasts
An Atlantic island where the walking is the point and the sand is not. Six nights in May for two travellers, split between the south coast and a village on the north side: two long levada walks, one dawn on the ridge, and a hire car, because the valleys do not connect.
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Who this trip is for
Ordinary fitness, boots worn in before departure, and no great appetite for lying still: that is who this week suits. The organising idea is to sleep on both sides of the island rather than commute across it, because north and south run different weather on the same afternoon, and you only understand that from the inside. May is the balance point in our readings: 23.4 °C by day, 17.4 °C at night, and 35.2 mm of rain on six days with measurable rain, against 655.4 mm and 79 wet days over the year. July and August are drier still, 3.1 mm and 4.4 mm, but those are the crowded months and the slopes have finished flowering. Dinner in a mountain village costs a fraction of the same plate on the marina, and that shapes where this week sleeps.
Day by day
Day 1 — Arrival and Funchal at ground level
The airport lies fourteen kilometres east of the capital and the expressway makes the transfer short, twenty minutes or so, tunnels most of the way. Give the rest of the day to Funchal on foot: the market hall with its fish counter and its wall of painted tiles, the old town where every door has been painted by a different artist, and the gardens stacked up the slope above the bay. Walk the seafront promenade west until the buildings begin to thin out. Eat early, because the island keeps farmers' hours rather than mainland ones, and tomorrow starts long before first light.
Day 2 — Up to Monte, then a low coastal levada
Ride the cable car from the seafront to the village on the shoulder above town: several hundred metres of climb in a quarter of an hour, and the clearest demonstration of how the city is stacked on its slope. Walk the tropical garden there slowly, then come back down by road rather than by the wicker toboggan, which is a photograph rather than a descent. In the afternoon take a coastal levada, chosen deliberately low. These irrigation channels contour the hillside, so the gradient stays close to flat while the drop beside you does not. Stay under the cloud belt today.
Day 3 — Dawn on the ridge between the two summits
Start before light for the high path linking the island's two highest points. It is cut into rock above sixteen hundred metres, with stairs, tunnels and real exposure, and it is the one walk here that demands a head for heights and warm layers; the temperature up there bears no relation to the coastal figures. Going early pays twice: cloud generally fills the valleys from below through the morning, and the parking overflows. Check the evening before that the trail is open, because heavy rain closes it. Then spend the afternoon as low, flat and horizontal as you can manage.
Day 4 — Across the pass into the laurel forest
Pack the car and cross the island by the central pass, then drop into the laurel forest on the north side: genuinely old woodland rather than a planted park, and the reason for the UNESCO listing. The classic walk follows a channel through mossy trees to a waterfall at the head of a valley, and it passes through unlit rock tunnels where a phone torch is not enough. A head torch is not optional. Allow most of the day, since the return reverses the same path. Sleep in a north-coast village, where the evening is cooler and far darker than the south.
Day 5 — Rock pools, the old coast road, the high moorland
Give the morning to the natural pools at the island's north-west corner, where lava set into basins that fill and empty with the swell; swimming there is the closest Madeira comes to a beach day. Then drive the old coast road where it survives, a single lane cut under dripping cliffs and through hand-dug tunnels, bypassed now and all the better for it. Climb afterwards onto the high moorland plateau in the middle of the island, treeless, windswept and nothing like the coast an hour below. Come back down the west side, through terraced vineyards, to your village for the night.
Day 6 — Back south by the west, cliff platform and wine lodges
Return to the south coast slowly, by the west rather than through the tunnels. The cliff platform west of the capital has a glass floor and several hundred metres of nothing beneath it, which is either the highlight of the day or the thing you walk past; below it a terrace of vines still worked by hand runs down to the water. Back in the capital, give the late afternoon to the wine lodges, where the island's fortified wine is aged in heat rather than in cellars. Take the last dinner in the old town rather than out on the marina.
Day 7 — The bare eastern peninsula, then out
Drive east past the airport to the peninsula that ends the island, and walk out along it. Everything green stops: the rock is bare, red and layered, the wind is constant, and the path runs along a spine with open water on both sides, an hour out and the same back. It looks like a different island because it is a different geology, and it is the only walk here with no trees at all. Rinse off in the bay at the base of the peninsula, then finish the short run to the terminal, which stands on stilts above the water.
Updated on 21 September 2026.
