Cruise calls
Is Funchal busy today?
Three ships alongside puts several thousand people into a very small old town at the same hour. This page reads the port authority's own berth reservations — 50 calls by 40 ships — and says which days those are.
On Thursday 10 September, no cruise ships are in Funchal with passengers ashore. Funchal takes 30 to 50 calls a month from October to April and as few as three in July.
Thursday 10 September
No ships
No cruise passengers in town today.
The next fortnight
Ships whose passengers are actually ashore, by day. Times are Madeira's own, exactly as the port publishes them.
- Thu 10 Sept — No ships
- Fri 11 Sept — No ships
- Sat 12 Sept — No ships
- Sun 13 Sept — No ships
- Mon 14 Sept — No ships
- Tue 15 Sept — No ships
- Wed 16 Sept One ship in
- VENTURA 07:00–17:00
- Thu 17 Sept — No ships
- Fri 18 Sept — No ships
- Sat 19 Sept One ship in
- DISNEY DREAM 06:45–16:15
- Sun 20 Sept — No ships
- Mon 21 Sept — No ships
- Tue 22 Sept — No ships
- Wed 23 Sept — No ships
The quiet days
Nothing alongside. If you were going to do the Mercado dos Lavradores, the cable car or Monte, do them on one of these.
- Friday 11 September
- Saturday 12 September
- Sunday 13 September
The worst day on the schedule
Wednesday 21 October — 4 ships ashore at once.
- AMADEA overnight → 17:00
- HANSEATIC SPIRIT alongside all day
- LIBERTY OF THE SEAS 07:00–17:00
- LE LAPEROUSE 12:30 → overnight
Why a quiet week is normal
Funchal's cruise season is winter, not summer — by a factor of ten. These are actual calls per month at the port, from APRAM's own statistics.
- January 41 2025: 36
- February 44 2025: 32
- March 44 2025: 37
- April 44 2025: 50
- May 14 2025: 7
- June 7 2025: 3
- July 3 2025: 2
- August 3 2025: 5
2026 calls per month, with 2025 alongside for comparison. February ran 44 calls; July ran 3. So a fortnight with almost nothing in is the season, not a broken scraper — the schedule fills out sharply from October. The current month is outside that series, so this page does not claim a figure for it.
Source: APRAM — Movimento dos navios de cruzeiro que escalaram o Porto do Funchal, Janeiro a Agosto 2025/2026, read 2026-09-09. It covers January to August only, so the autumn months are deliberately absent rather than estimated.
How the days are graded
| Ships ashore | Reads as |
|---|---|
| 0 | No ships |
| 1 | One ship in |
| 2 | Lively |
| 3 | Busy |
| 4 or more | Heaving |
"Ashore" means alongside for at least 3 hours between 09:00 and 18:00 — the hours passengers are actually in town. A ship that berths at 22:00 and sails at 05:00 is in port and lands nobody, so it is listed and not counted. That window is our judgement, not the port's.
Read this before trusting it
This mirrors APRAM's berth reservations for the Port of Funchal and nothing else. Reservations change: ships are delayed by weather, calls get cancelled at short notice, and a booking made after our last check will not appear until the next one. The times are the port's, in Madeira's own timezone.
Passenger numbers are not published here, so this page does not invent them. APRAM lists ships, not people, and a "several thousand passengers" figure would mean pairing each ship with a capacity from somewhere unsourced. Ship count is what the port actually says. It is also what you can verify yourself by looking down at the harbour.
The schedule only reaches a few months out and drops days once they pass, so the git history of this site's copy is the only record of how busy Funchal was on a date already gone.