by
Nancy Lyon
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Black
bullwhips. That’s what they look like, these long black fishy
strips glistening in the morning sun, dangling over marble slabs
at the market in Funchal. When you buy one, the fishmonger rolls
it into a hoop and stuffs its tail in its mouth like a Celtic
knot work beasty from the Book of Kells. If I hadn’t tasted one
on a skewer with peppers and onions before seeing what it looked
like, I wouldn’t go near it with a pitchfork.
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A vertiginous levada ledge looking down to the ocean below
See
also… Levada
do Furado
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Scabbard fish at Funchal fish market
Dragon
tree
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“No
one has ever seen one alive,” Miguel remarks as we gape at the enormous
glassy, bloated eyes and rapier teeth that could pass for vampire
fangs. The espada – scabbard fish – the national dish of Madeira,
lives at the extraordinary depth of 2,600 feet below the sea. By
the time the hardy island fishermen pull up their mile-long lines,
the eel-like fish are dead from the decompression.
I’ve
begun this island ode with black whips just to get your attention.
But it’s really not fair. Though the espada has an evil eye, and
Madeira’s rocky coastline is treacherous, its mountainous terra
firma is sublime. Botanists go bananas – and pomegranates and papaws
– here. More than 700 indigenous and 120 endemic species grow on
Madeira, and grow to phenomenal proportions. There are 1,000-year-old
giant heather bushes 40 feet high. The eerie dragon tree – a Medusa
with snarled serpentine branches as thick as boa constrictors, and
a sap yielding a red dye known as dragon’s blood.
Madeira’s
rich red wine will make you drunk. But so will its opiate breezes
laced with oleander and roses, and its fruity reverie of pomegranates,
tangerines and mangos, loquats and quince. In this floating garden
intoxicated with light, flowers glow supernaturally and leaves glint
like emeralds.
Drag
out the P word. That shameless tourist cliché –’paradise.’ Madeira’s
levada walks are a paradise for hikers, and comparable to trekking
in China for scenic mountain highs. The vertical landscapes here
drive you dizzy. Cabo Girao, a stupefying 1,900-foot drop, is the
second-highest sea cliff in the world. The short airport runway
(regarded as the most dangerous in the world) is hoisted onto concrete
pylons sunk into the sea. Madeira’s towns and villages are securely
fastened to the coast. But its roads through the interior – crazy
squiggles on the map – cling like barnacles to the cliffs. And on
the steeply terraced fields evocative of Machu Pichu, representing
millions of hours of human toil, even the vegetables get vertigo.
But the 260,000 Madeirans who live on this vertiginous hunk jutting
up 20,000 feet from the seabed are a sure-footed race.
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Which
brings us to the questions of beaches. Although you can leap straight
into the ocean from various Madeiran hotels for a refreshing dip,
most people in search of beach head for Porto Santo. The silken
sands on this island, a 90-minute ferry ride away, are said to have
curative properties. But the three other islands in this archipelago,
Zlheu Chao, Deserta Grande and Bugio are inhospitable and uninhabited
but for colonies of ferocious poisonous black spiders. |
Boats in the Funchal Marina
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I
like to imagine, like some islanders, that Madeira is a resurrected
chunk of the lost continent of Atlantis sunk west of the Straits
of Gibraltar 80,000 years ago. Or a fragment of Lemuria, the vanished
land linking Madagascar to India and Sumatra in another age. The
Ice Age never touched it, so it preserves the remnants of the tropical
rain forest and the climate that central and southern Europe enjoyed
in the early Cenozoic a million years ago – a five-month long (70°F/21°C)
spring and a seven-month long (80°F/27°C) summer, with Canary Ocean
currents warming the sea to 61-68°F (16-20°C).
This
marooned Portuguese island is closer to Casablanca, Morocco on the
African coast 340 miles away than it is to Lisbon, at 611 miles.
Madeira’s soul is Mediterranean. Its culture is decidedly European.
Its history and commerce are markedly British, and its mentality
100 per cent island. I’m lucky to have Miguel Jardim, who comes
from an old Madeiran wine family and knows his Sercial, Verdelho,
Boal and Malmsey, to show (and drive) me around. His dignified English
accent is not out of place here. Although Madeira is an autonomous
region of Portugal, the English presence is pervasive. The old Reid’s
Hotel, where tuxedos at dinner are still de rigueur, epitomizes
the genteel life of the British who sojourned here enroute from
Africa and India in the 19th century, George Bernard Shaw and Winston
Churchill among them.
Miguel
drives his cousin’s lurching jeep like an old safari hand. On Madeira
car rentals are reasonably priced, but when driving here is a stunt
adventure, many visitors take taxis or island buses. I learned the
first rule of the road a few miles out of the capital Funchal (‘Wild
Fennel’) which looks like a Greek coliseum set into the hillside,
with whitewashed houses pitched in rows facing the spectacle of
the sea. Christopher Columbus lived here for a few years after his
marriage to Madeiran Dona Filipa Moniz, but Madeirans don’t make
a big deal of it. One of his houses was unceremoniously torn down.
After
lurching up a narrow road so steep it felt like our jeep could flip-flop
over and slide downhill on its roof, we had to lurch back down with
a wheezing banana truck in our face. Rule number one: what goes
up a steep twisty one-lane Madeiran road must sometimes come back
down backwards. In Madeira the vehicle coming down the hill always
has the right-of-way. Especially ten-ton trucks!
Madeiran
roads are remarkable feats of construction, allowing traffic to
average a steady 12 miles an hour. Fortunately for visitors, Madeira’s
bus system transports people and what-have-you from one end of the
286 square mile, 6,107-foot high volcanic island to the other at
remarkably reliable intervals. Buses are a cheap, sociable way to
access the dozens of scenic walks along the narrow levadas, Madeira’s
unique watercourses.
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View
from a Levada walk
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Madeira’s
lushness partly depends on its elaborate irrigation system of over
1,350 miles of levadas, which channel water from the wet northern
and central regions to terraced farms in the arid south. The footpaths
along these narrow aqueducts, built five centuries ago by Moorish
slaves, make spectacularly scenic, if sometimes harrowing, hiking
trails. Some levada walks politely meander beside grassy knolls,
mossy ravines, carpets of wild oats and barley, through virgin forests
of heath and laurel, fields of poppies and thistles, fruit orchards
and banana and sugarcane plantations. Others rudely skirt sheer
drops of 1,300 feet, skim escarpments, chasms, and abysses, and
pass through dark tunnels, under waterfalls and over diabolically
slippery red clay.
In
their meticulously detailed guide to driving and walking around
Madeira, Landscapes of Madeira, John and Pat Underwood describe
the challenges of certain levada walks. Of the Ponta de Sao Lourenco
levada, they advise: “It’s particularly difficult for the short
of leg to find footholds, especially when contemplating the foaming
jaws of death below… Hang on to the trees while making this very
steep descent.”
I
could have walked for weeks along the levadas, soothed by the aromatherapy
of the hundreds of flowery scents, the shifting light and shade,
the sound of coursing water, and the pure Zen of the scenery. But
there was Madeiran wine to taste and Fado music to sob over.
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Miguel
took me to the Casa dos Vizihos da Madeira of the old Madeira wine
family company of Henriques & Henriques to taste some Sercial,
Verdelho, Boal and Malmsey. During a few hours of heady sipping
among venerable aged-oak casks, I learned all about, and forgot
all about, how Madeira’s wine is made. And I listened to various
conflicting versions of how Madeira’s human history began, with
a wayward vessel:
English
adventurer Robert Machim and his lover Anne d’Arfet fled Bristol,
England, in 1346. Either he was a nobleman and she was his concubine
of lower station, or she was from a noble family who refused to
let her marry a mere knight. Machim and his mistress and crew sailed
for Portugal – or maybe that was France – but a storm blew them
off course and they ended up on Madeira. The crew mutinied. Anne
took ill and died. And Machim died three days later of a broken
heart.
Fado
is Portugal’s answer to Country & Western, Miguel says. But
I really think it’s more tragic, like the Blues. At the Restaurante
a Seta in Monte, a short, steep taxi ride from Funchal, visitors
can ‘enjoy’ this sweaty, passionate Portuguese tradition, along
with a traditional Espetada-on-a-skewer dinner. Fado-lovers love
misery. Even when it’s sung badly, off key and in a gravelly voice,
Fado’s haunting erratic and aberrant vocal undulations inspired
by Flamenco and Arab singing, and its tragic lyrics are said to
plunge its listeners into an emotional stupor, wallowing in sadness,
grief over unrequited love and betrayal, and lust for revenge.
And
here’s where those black whips come in.
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