The Garden Isle of Madeira – escape from winter!
Winter has finally arrived in northern Europe and the days are short and dark. It’s the ideal time to enjoy Madeira. Lush vegetation, mountains and levadas await your discovery.
Aloe aborescens
Madeira Tour & Trail Map
Discovery Walking Guides have released their 8th editions of their Tour & Trail Maps to the Garden Isle (a choice of map-paper or Super-Durable polymer). Walkers keep on buying these for their accuracy, clarity and wealth of up-to-date detail.
Ask for them in your favourite bookshop or get them online from your choice of stockists.
Here’s a link to amazon UK’s information page about the Super-Durable edition:
Madeira: Good news – PR1 high altitude route re-opens
The route to Pico Ruivo
Madeira’s majestic high-level mountain route, the PR1 – Vereda do Areeiro to Pico Ruivo, has re-opened to walkers.
Landslides that had damaged the route have been cleared and fencing replaced.
This is the BIG one for high altitude afficionades!
(Image, thanks to Shirley Whitehead, walking researcher and author) – see http://www.dwgwalking.co.uk/mad.htm
The Garden Isle of Madeira – Beautiful in Spring
Aloe aborescens
Springtime! The northern hemisphere’s Spring is well under way now. For those interested in flora, there’s nowhere quite like Madeira in the Springtime.
Echium candicans – popular with bees
Madeira is always green – now it bursts into colour and perfume. Many of the plants you’ll come across while walking its levadas and country paths are endemic and exclusive to the island.
Two of the many beauties to look out for are orchids and the rare Yellow Foxglove. If you enjoy seeing wonderful plants growing strong and free, Madeira is the place to visit.
For information about the Garden Island, including books and maps, see http://www.dwgwalking.co.uk/mad.htm
(The plant images here were taken by Shirley & Mike Whitehead, authors and researchers resident on the island of Madeira.)
Yellow foxglove (Isoplexus sceptrum)
Orchis maderensis
Madeira – updates – official PR walking routes
From ‘Shirley Whitehead’s Madeira Walks’
If you’re off to Madeira, take a look at the island government’s website to check which routes are currently closed or undergoing work. Walking conditions can change quickly due to weather, landslides or other factors.
The Madeiran authorities recognise the importance of walking visitors to their lovely island and are quick to restore paths and levadas to good order.
From ‘Shirley Whitehead’s Madeira Walks’.
It’s a useful website and updated frequently.
Here’s the link to the English language version http://www.visitmadeira.pt/?s=menu&e=/madeira/trekking&i=eng
Madeira – the Garden Isle
If you were standing, right now, on the Pico do Ruivo, Madeira, and looked west, this is the view you’d be seeing. After one of the gloomiest, darkest northern European winters on record, wouldn’t this do your soul good, not to mention your fitness 🙂 ?
Madeira has long been an A-grade walking destination, offering levada walking along man-made water canals as well as trails for the most adventurous mountain hiker. Then there’s the wonderful endemic plant life too. The best thing is – simply go and see for yourself.
Here’s the map that goes with the photo.
There’s more information here :- http://www.dwgwalking.co.uk/mad.htm
discoverywalking 