Driving in Madeira

Everybody arrives on Madeira braced for the climbs. It is what the photographs are of, it is what the guidebooks lead with, and it is what people mean when they tell you the driving here is hard.

The climbs are the easy half. You will spend just as long coming back down them, and that is the part nobody thinks about until they are doing it.

Coming down is the part nobody warns you about

On the steep roads, descending is almost entirely a braking exercise. You are not managing a gradient so much as managing your speed against it, continuously, for as long as the road goes down.

Here is the thing that catches people out. Even when you have pressed the pedal halfway, you are still driving fast.

That sounds harmless and it is the whole problem. Your instinct reads the pedal rather than the road: you are only halfway down its travel, so you assume you have plenty in reserve. You have less than it feels like. It is genuinely easy to overestimate how much more braking is available to you, and to find out at the moment you need it.

The failure mode is not the dramatic one. Nobody is going over an edge. What actually happens is that you close on the car in front faster than you meant to, on a slope, with less left in the pedal than you thought — and you bump somebody.

So the advice is simple and slightly boring: leave more room than you would at home. Not a little more. Enough that a misjudgement is absorbed by the gap rather than by the car ahead.

We drove an automatic, which this site recommends for entirely different reasons. It made the descents slightly easier. Slightly — and it does not solve this. Do not let the gearbox talk you into a following distance you would not take anywhere else.

Is it actually dangerous?

Generally, no. And the reasons are worth knowing, because the island’s reputation does most of its damage before you have driven anything.

Start with the shape of the road. On the mountain roads, one side of you is the mountain itself and the other has a low concrete wall running along the outer edge, there to stop a car going over. It is on most of the roads that climb, not the occasional stretch. Once you have registered that it is there, most of the exposure you were bracing for stops feeling like exposure.

Then there is who else is on the road. A great many of them are tourists, and tourists here drive carefully. The locals are not in a rush either — even behind somebody crawling, you will rarely see anyone force an overtake to get past.

The exception is the taxi drivers, who feel a great deal too comfortable driving fast into some of these turns. They know the road, they are working, and they are not going to wait behind you. Let them by and think no more about it.

Which leaves the honest answer to the question. The danger on Madeira is not the road, the drop, or the other drivers. It is your own brakes, on the way down, in the part of a descent where you have stopped concentrating.

The roads that do not look like roads

Some of them are barely wider than the car — wide enough for the vehicle and very little else, to the point where you will genuinely wonder whether this counts as a road at all, and whether you have taken a wrong turn somewhere.

You almost certainly have not.

These are the ones that tempt you to reverse out and find another way round, and the temptation is worth resisting. Often enough they save you enough time to justify themselves comfortably. Take them. The first one is unnerving. After that they are simply how you get places here.

It does help enormously to be in something small. That is not really a driving tip, it is a booking decision, and it is the one this site argues hardest.

Parking is easier than the reputation suggests

Everything below is about the island outside Funchal. The city is a separate question and this page does not try to answer it.

Out on the island, parking is mostly straightforward. The thing to understand is the convention: on a lot of the narrower roads, cars park down one side and the other side is left as a single running lane for traffic in both directions. It looks like chaos and works fine. Ponta do Sol is about as clear an example of it as you will find.

The one place people waste effort is at the well-known stops. At somewhere like Pico do Areeiro or Fanal, spaces start appearing a long way out — about a kilometre before the place itself. After a climb, an empty space is a tempting thing.

Drive past it. Go all the way to where the location actually is and look there first. Often enough you will walk the whole distance back only to discover you could have parked at the top, and there is no prize for the extra kilometre.

Pico do Areeiro deserves its own warning on this. The parking a kilometre down is steeply uphill from the summit, so if you take it, the walk back up is a small warm-up hike before the actual one. Which is a fine thing to choose and a miserable thing to discover.

One thing worth checking before you drive out to any trailhead at all: whether the walk is open. Closures here are common and are not always announced anywhere you would think to look, so we keep a live trail status page for exactly that.

Do not bother shopping around for fuel

There is nothing to shop around for. Fuel on Madeira is capped by regional decree and comes out the same at every station on the island. Any guide that tells you otherwise has copied the advice from the mainland, where it is true. We publish the current cap and its history, because the government’s own page overwrites itself every week and nobody else keeps it.

The short version

Leave a bigger gap on the way down than feels necessary, because the brake pedal flatters you. Take the roads that look too narrow. Drive to the actual car park before you settle for the first space you see. Let the taxis past.

And do not spend the start of the trip frightened of an island that mostly is not frightening — the walls are there, nobody is in a hurry, and the only thing genuinely worth respecting is the descent.