Cloaking the steep, cloud-wrapped slopes of Madeira’s north is a forest unlike almost any other on Earth. The laurisilva — from the Latin for “laurel forest” — is the largest surviving expanse of a kind of subtropical evergreen woodland that, millions of years ago, blanketed much of southern Europe and North Africa. There it died out as the climate cooled and dried during the Ice Ages; on mild, wet, isolated Madeira it survived. Walking into it is, quite literally, walking into a living fossil.
A relic of a vanished world
During the Tertiary period the warm, humid laurel forest stretched across the Mediterranean basin. The advancing ice and increasing aridity of the Quaternary wiped it out across the continent, but the Macaronesian islands — Madeira, the Azores, the Canaries — held a stable, oceanic climate that allowed pockets of it to persist. Madeira’s is by far the most extensive and best-preserved, covering some 15,000 hectares, the bulk of it primary forest that has never been cleared.
In recognition of this, UNESCO inscribed the Laurisilva of Madeira as a World Heritage Site in 1999, judging it an outstanding relict ecosystem of global importance.
How the forest works
The laurisilva is a cloud forest. The north-east trade winds drive moist Atlantic air up against the mountains, where it condenses into near-permanent cloud. The trees comb water directly from this mist — “horizontal precipitation” — so that the forest is perpetually dripping even when no rain falls. This makes the laurisilva the island’s great water factory, feeding the springs and streams that the levadas were built to harvest and carry south.
The canopy is dominated by a handful of broad-leaved evergreen trees, several of them found only here:
- Til (Ocotea foetens) — a giant of the forest, capable of enormous size and age.
- Vinhático (Persea indica) — the “Madeira mahogany,” once prized for furniture.
- Barbusano (Apollonias barbujana).
- Laurel (Laurus novocanariensis) — the namesake of the whole forest.
Beneath them grows a luxuriant understorey of tree heath, ferns, mosses and the bright endemic flowers of the island — orchids, the blue Madeira cranesbill, and the cabbage-like Musschia.
Walking the laurisilva
Many of the island’s finest levada walks run straight through the heart of the forest — among them the Levada do Caldeirão Verde and Levada das 25 Fontes, where the path tunnels under dripping ferns to waterfalls plunging into green amphitheatres. The Fanal plateau, where ancient, contorted til trees loom out of the fog, has become one of the most photographed places on the island.
Protection
Almost the entire forest lies within the Madeira Natural Park, established in 1982, which covers roughly two-thirds of the island. Fire — historically used to clear land — remains the great threat, along with invasive species. Yet the laurisilva endures as the island’s ecological crown jewel and the source of its enduring nickname: Ilha Jardim, the Garden Island.
See also
- Endemic Wildlife & Flora Isolation has made Madeira an evolutionary hothouse — home to the Trocaz pigeon, Zino's petrel, the Madeiran wall lizard, the monk seal and hundreds of endemic plants and invertebrates.
- Climate & Weather Madeira enjoys a mild subtropical climate with warm summers, gentle winters and little seasonal change — but its mountains create dramatic contrasts between a wet north, a sunny south and a cold, cloud-piercing interior.
- Levadas Madeira’s levadas are centuries-old irrigation channels that carry water from the wet north to the cultivated south across cliffs and through tunnels — and whose maintenance paths form one of the world’s great hiking networks.
- Geography & Geology Madeira is the eroded summit of an oceanic shield volcano built up over millions of years on the African Plate — a young, steep, deeply dissected mountain rising straight from deep ocean.