This island of a million stars

February 18, 2025, 7:49 pm , by Richard Lutz

RICHARD LUTZ is in Madeira

Many of my holidays are best remembered by The Big Story that dominated the news industry as I tried to relax.

There was the dramatic rescue of Peruvian miners trapped underground for 69 days (during my break in Suffolk); there was an Albanian pyramid money swindle (during a California trip); there was a huge Winter Olympics (seen continually during a weekend in Bologna) and, there was the Cameron victory in the 2010 UK elections (a Tuscan walking holiday).

And going way back, there was a frantic alert over an approaching New England hurricane (during a Cape Cod stay). These weather bulletins, by the way, became more doomladen each hour until it finally smashed through our tv screen and forced us to take cover in a high school gym until danger died.

For this month’s holiday to the Portuguese island of Madeira, it has been, of course, wall-to- wall Trump. Trump this, Trump that, Trump pisses off everyone, Trump threatens everyone, Trump alienates all his international allies. We stopped watching the huge tv on our wall two days into the stay.

That left us more time to get to know Madeira a bit better rather than sitting popeyed watching 24/7 coverage of the world imploding. And there was much to see. The island, 350 miles off the Moroccan coast, is mountainous and riven with deep canyons connected by cliffhanging trails that follow old water aqueducts called levadas. Like this one:

The paths are immaculate and properly maintained. And in case you’re wondering about that low overarching branch, it’s a heather tree…a giant brother to the ground-hugging heather plant that dots the colder Scots climate 1800 miles north.

High above the levadas, much higher, are a series of mountains and saw toothed ridges. This view is from a 6000 foot peak overlooking the endless Atlantic:

That slim chunk of island offshore is Porto Santos. Others offer intriguing names such as Desertas and, somewhere over the horizon, The Savage Islands.

Back down to planet earth and tucked beneath these big mountains is Funchal, Madeira’s only real town. It’s nestled between the sea and a series of towering hills that drop 2000 feet to both sides of the harbour. It’s bejewelled by gardens such as the Botanics which can be reached by cable car.

So, the mountains looming above. Funchal spread below. And it’s here in this city that there’s a nightly showstopper of a million twinkling lights from the innumerable homes that cram the precipitous hills- all strung together by tiny twisted lanes lit by cars and buses crawling upwards. It’s nothing short of an illuminated spider’s web.

With this backdrop, ambling through the Funchal night is tantamount to walking towards a curtain of stars twinkling back at you. It upends your sense of what is before you and what is over you. Dimensional context become confused. It is lit like a galaxy.

Surprisingly, there is no way to depart Madeira by sea. Politicians have tried to keep a ferry alive. But, there just isn’t the demand. So, it’s an airplane or don’t leave. And since the island has little in the way of flat ground, the airport runway juts over a highway, past cliffs and then out into the sea. And that means weather changes can cause infamous delays and cancellations (my flight back was postponed by ten hours).

This isolation, of course, causes problems. Gabriel, in his twenties, says it’s just too expensive to travel abroad or find a good job that he wants.

He wants to leave. Many do. Skilled workers take those flights to Lisbon or Porto to find employment. It sounds familiar, a constant complaint in marginal communities. There’s a skills drain, explains Gabriel. Talk to folks from a Scottish island such as Skye, for instance, and people will say the mainland is the only way to get ahead.

That hurts the Madeira economy and leaves lucrative year round tourism as a main income. So, sadly, many homes become Airbandb fodder or holiday rentals with those lock up key boxes marring a front door. And it means Madeira, with its pleasant climate, its combination of peaks and ocean, its profusion of gardens (and heather trees), is a gem to visit but a difficult place to earn a good living outside of a burgeoning tourism industry.