The Big Blue

On Madeira, a lush dot of Portuguese land, the North Atlantic has shaped every aspect of life for centuries—the economy, the gastronomy, the infrastructure. Nina Caplan explores the cliff-top eyries and beachside towns of this gift from the sea. Photographs by Rodrigo Cardoso

- Nina Caplan

IN 1419, WHEN PORTUGUESE seafarers happened on an uninhabited island in the North Atlantic, around 800 kilometres off the African coast, they were awed by the dense covering of greenery. Even today, after 600 years of human encroachment, their amazement is easy to understand. The variety of flora is astounding: groves of local mahogany, bushy stands of indigenous lily of the valley, and a laurel forest, the largest surviving relic of the vegetation that covered much of southern Europe at least 15 million years ago. Those first men who arrived on the island called it Madeira—the Portuguese word for wood.

But those 15th-century sailors were perhaps indifferent to what struck me most forcibly when I first visited this summer: the insistent presence of the ocean. Madeira—the largest island in an archipelago of the same name—is so steep that even inland, when I walked through a vineyard or dined on a hillside, bright water framed the view. In the capital city, Funchal, on the southern coast, hotels, and restaurants take full advantage of a vista that never gets boring. But at ground level, strolling along sidewalks decorated with traditional cream-and-black mosaics, I was still distracted by gaps between buildings that offered to shift glints of blue. The Atlantic affects the climate, wildlife, and food. Those sailors, I thought, should have called their discovery mar—the sea.