Madeira rarely travels alone. The island is the centrepiece of a small archipelago of volcanic land scattered across the eastern Atlantic, all of it governed as part of the Autonomous Region of Madeira. The group belongs to Macaronesia, the biogeographic region of Atlantic island chains that also takes in the Azores, the Canary Islands and Cape Verde.
Porto Santo
About 40 kilometres north-east of Madeira lies Porto Santo, the archipelago’s only other inhabited island and, in temperament, its opposite. Where Madeira is green, steep and wet, Porto Santo is low, dry and golden — fringed by a single magnificent beach nearly nine kilometres long, whose fine sand is reputed to have therapeutic properties.
Porto Santo was, in fact, settled first, in 1419, after Portuguese captains were blown onto it; it served as the base from which Madeira itself was colonised the following year. Christopher Columbus is known to have lived on the island for a time in the 1470s, having married the daughter of its first captain, Bartolomeu Perestrelo. Today a ferry and a small airport link it to the main island, and it is chiefly a quiet beach and golf destination.
The Desertas
South-east of Madeira, three long, arid, uninhabited islands — the Ilhas Desertas (“Deserted Islands”) — rise as sheer ridges from the sea. They form a strict nature reserve, important above all as one of the last refuges of the Mediterranean monk seal (Monachus monachus), one of the world’s rarest marine mammals, whose Madeiran population was brought back from the edge of extinction through protection of these waters. Access is tightly restricted.
The Selvagens
Far to the south, almost halfway to the Canary Islands, lie the tiny and remote Ilhas Selvagens (“Savage Islands”). Though geographically closer to the Canaries, they are Portuguese, and the surrounding sea is a vast protected area — among the oldest nature reserves in Portugal and a crucial breeding ground for seabirds such as Cory’s shearwater. Only wardens and the occasional licensed researcher or sailor set foot on them.
A living laboratory
Their isolation has made the islands of the archipelago a showcase of evolution. Cut off in the ocean for millions of years, plants and animals here diverged into forms found nowhere else — the endemic species of the laurel forest, the seabirds of the cliffs and islets, the wall lizards of the rocks. Together with the laurisilva, this biological richness is the archipelago’s quiet claim to global significance.
See also
- Madeira An autonomous region of Portugal and the main island of a small Atlantic archipelago — a single eroded volcano famous for its laurel forest, levadas, fortified wine and year-round spring.
- 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.
- 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.