Roughly five hours after I took that photo I last showed you, of Seixal on the north coast, we found ourselves in a scary-windy, wet end-of-day moment at the lighthouse on the farthest west point of the island, the Farol da Ponta do Pargo. These are the cliffs looking northeast from the ledge below the lighthouse. Standing there was both beautiful and frightening. From this point, going west, the next inhabited land would be one of the islands of the Caribbean – and that’s a long, long way away.
Thus far we’ve shown you photos of only one location per post for Madeira, but since I’ve now been here five days (with only two more to go, before I decamp for a few days in Porto on the Portuguese mainland) and have covered the width, breadth and depth of the island, I’m going to show you below a few more photos of places we visited in the 24 hours after this photo above. As you’ll see, the island has enormous range of climate, flora, landscape, feel.
Views from the center of the village of Curral das Freiras, looking both up (above) and down (below) — so that you have a sense of how remarkably steep is the valley across which this little village is spread. The name means Pen (or Corral, or Refuge perhaps…) of the Nuns, apparently because nuns took refuge here during some attack of the Napoleonic wars, though accounts vary. I didn’t take any photos from the top of Pico do Arieiro, which we visited next, simply because there was so much fog, wind and rain that there was absolutely no point.
After being blown off the 1800+-meter high Pico do Arieiro by the wind and rain, we rolled on down to the northern-coastal town of Santana, whose main claim to fame are these cute little A-frame “traditional houses.”…and we ended the day on the easternmost point of the island, at Ponta de São Lourenço. Obviously I’ve got tons more photos from these places and more which we’ll be showing you in weeks ahead. Now that I’ve caught the numbers up, some of the Madeira shots will start fitting into other categories in order to accommodate my little number-sequence mania du moment. 🙂
The church in the lovely little town center of Sao Vicente, on the north coast of the island at one end of a the “huge valley that tears Madeira into two halves,” to quote the LP pocket Madeira guidebook 🙂
Looking north from the same valley as our last post (which showed the view looking south from Serra de Agua). At the bottom of the valley is Sao Vicente, of which more later, naturally. 🙂
Two views along the coast towards Funchal, from Cabo Girao, where there’s a glass walkway more than 500 meters above the beach. You’ll see those pics in due course :-).
OK, it’s immediately clear that Madeira, and the lovely city of Funchal where I’m staying, will present abundant moments of beauty which I’ll want to photograph. At least when the sun is shining, which it has today and may choose not to do again during my week here. So I’ve already snapped more’n enough to get me through my remaining 47 days of posts, hence my three-in-a-day milestone today. Each of these lovely little entrances sits on one short street :-).
A new series for a new place, of which you see my very first photo immediately above and, just below, the remaining photos taken as our airplane approached the runway of this lovely mountainous island off the Atlantic coast of Morocco yesterday afternoon. I want to share them fast, because of that lovely sense of discovery I had, after a 7am flight out of a very cold Amsterdam and connecting time in Lisbon, as our plane came ever closer to the waves below us and I eagerly looked for my first view of this new island. Semi-perfectionist (or mildly obsessive) individual that I am, it hurts me to fall out of number order – somewhere a few months ago I decided I’d try to have some numeric order in my series – but as I’ve wanted to launch an “islands” series ever since I realized the missed opportunity after I’d posted most of my lovely Texel photos, I simply don’t want to wait longer.
The blog tells me I’ve now posted at least one new post per day, for 317 days in a row. This means I need to cover 48 more days and I’ll hit my 365-day mark in the second half of January, and then I really do think I’ll allow myself another extended break. In the meantime I do keep seeing amazing stuff on walks, from flights, during bike rides…and it’s fun to share. Hope you’ll enjoy these new views. More from this island in the days ahead. (And yep, if you view it in full blog mode, you’ll see the nation and island in the “categories,” otherwise a future post will be less mysterious, I’m sure…).
(so much world, so little time....) 