Madeira, Portugal: Tropical Europe for a Third the Price

Madeira, Portugal
Madeira’s stunning cliffs and villages make it one of Europe’s most breathtaking escapes.|©iStock/Freeartist

I do not want to write this story.

I’d urge you to skip this article and kindly move along to the next one. But alas, I am a travel writer—paid to travel hither and yon and to clue you in to the good, bad, and "yikes" of the places I alight.

The necessity of collecting a paycheck heartlessly dictates that I continue.

And yet… I’ve spent the better part of a week trying to figure out this next paragraph. I mean, how does one capture everything that needs to be said about a place so mesmerizing it grabs you in a way you never expected, and becomes one of your favorite spots on the planet.

Best I can come up with is a recipe.

In a big bowl of Atlantic Ocean, combine equal parts:

  • The central California coast (Pacific Coast Highway in and around Monterey and Carmel-by-the-Sea).

  • The tropical foliage, volcanic ambiance, and abundance of waterfalls found on Hawaii (or maybe St. Lucia in the Caribbean).

  • The terraced rice paddies of Vietnam or, maybe, the tea plantations of Indonesia, only covered in special breeds of Lilliputian bananas, some of which taste like apples.

  • Cloud-shrouded jagged mountain tops rising as much as 6,000 feet above the waves, and deep valleys and gorges roaring with mountain streams and creeks racing for the ocean.

  • Quaint villages of red-tiled roof homes, roadside fruit and veggie stands, old church steeples, and jungle vegetation—no doubt stolen from Costa Rica, Nicaragua, or maybe Colombia.

  • Clear, Grecian-blue waters.

  • And top it off with an Old World European city of just 105,000 that is easily one of the most quaint and picturesque small-town capitals you’ll find anywhere in Europe.

I know: Sounds terrible.

Which is precisely why you need to stay away from Madeira, a Portuguese island 300 miles off the coast of North Africa. (Find Morocco, then follow your finger due west.)

See, travel writing breeds a particular Catch 22—in reporting on a place, we encourage over-tourism and the destruction of the very essence of the place we’ve come to love.

Don’t write about it, and travelers miss out on seeing that this kind of nature, this kind of landscape perfection, really does exist in the world.

So, in a tug-of-war with better judgement… I’ll share, knowing that no superlative is superlative enough to capture Madeira.

Let’s just leave it at that, and move on to other aspects of my week on the island… and why it is that more and more Americans are holidaying in what many, many writers have called "the Hawaii of Europe."

I won’t call it that. Not because it’s inaccurate, but because it’s incomplete. Madeira is to Hawaii what the first inning is to a baseball game… it gives you some sense of what’s what, but there’s a whole lot more to the story.

The Secret We’d Rather Keep

A sea breeze and lush mountains make Madeira feel like tropical Europe.
A sea breeze and lush mountains make Madeira feel like tropical Europe.|©iStock/pawel.gaul

"I’m worried too many people will find out about Madeira and the island will change too much. We really hope it doesn’t change at all."

This is Rob Hoffman, a 60-year-old former journalist from Ann Arbor, Michigan, who retired to Madeira last August with his 59-year-old wife, Patti. Translation: Stay away! The "no vacancy" sign is blazing.

See? It’s not just me. The place is that special. Rob and Patti live 1,250 feet up the side of a mountain that pretty much terminates at the beach below. Their view is, well… you can see it for yourself.

As I told Rob over a coffee and a Portuguese custard-tart known as a pastel del nata at a hopping little breakfast café, "I’ve interviewed people all over the world, on every habitable continent—probably in 30 countries so far—and I’ve never been so amazed by the drive to someone’s house or office."

For 20 minutes, my rental car crawled up the mountain switchbacks, through small hamlets and lush banana plantations. A turn here and I’m gazing out over the crystalline Atlantic waters far below, and then the next curve has me awestruck by a heavily forested mountain, thousands of feet tall, behind a jungle-covered ravine.

A 3-bed, 2-bath, 4-patio apartment for $1,500 a month.

If you’ve ever seen the Kathleen Turner/Michael Douglas 1980s rom-com Romancing the Stone, you’ll have some idea of what I was seeing.

Rob and Patti chose this little village of Canhas, about 40 minutes west of Funchal, the island’s truly handsome capital city, because they wanted a view and a slower pace of life—and they wanted to be close to the city since they venture there frequently for Patti’s water aerobics classes and other needs tied to her multiple sclerosis.

But why Madeira in the first place?

Part of the Hoffmans’ decision was logical. Michigan winters are hideous, and "Michigan summers are getting pretty bad too," Rob told me. So, the couple went looking for a more agreeable climate.

Part of it was America’s situation vis-à-vis food—a culture locked-in on fast food, processed food, synthetic food, and empty calories, "which drove me absolutely nuts," Rob said. "I was living on junk and feeling bad, and that lifestyle was just no longer my thing."

And then there was the increasingly common refrain I keep hearing from expat Americans: "The country has become untenable. The chasm [between left and right] is the literal definition of ‘irreconcilable differences,’" Rob said. "So much hatred on both sides that wasn’t there 20 years ago. And the only way to get away from it now is to live somewhere I don’t have to think about it."

Rob had attended the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and, through that, was fluent in French. In the back of his mind, he’d always thought about living overseas. He also had access to citizenship through what’s known as the "Law of Return," a program that allows descendants of Portugal’s Sephardic Jewish community—driven out of the country centuries ago—to reclaim their lost nationality. (Spain, Germany, and Hungary have similar programs.)

Through that program, Rob claimed Portuguese citizenship back before the pandemic; that ultimately eased his path into the country. (Patti is working on a "family reunification visa" that will give her Portuguese residency.)

After the pandemic ended, he and Patti flew to mainland Portugal to explore the country. They loved it—the food, the people, the infrastructure. However, Rob told me, "we didn’t see a place to escape winter."

The Southern California-esque beach communities of the Algarve "empty out in winter and we didn’t want that. And up north (Porto, Braga, etc.) can be rainy and cold. Nazare (a famous surfing town) is wonderful, but we’re not really surfers and it gets cold in the winter too. Then we found Madeira…"

"The Best of Both Worlds"

Rob and Patti found the perfect climate in a walkable community with otherworldly views in the village of Canhas.
Rob and Patti found the perfect climate in a walkable community with otherworldly views in the village of Canhas.|©Jeff Opdyke

The Hoffmans spent six weeks on the island in 2023 and found that it was, as Rob called it, "the best of both worlds." Winter days rarely dip below 55 F and are more commonly in the range of 60 to 75 F. Summers rarely surpass the mid-80s. And there’s always a sea breeze.

The Hoffmans can walk to wherever they want to go in the village, and they maintain an apartment in Funchal for their time in the "big" city. They shop the local farmers’ markets for fresh fruit and veggies, and combined with all the exercise and the fresh sea air, "I know we’re healthier," Patti said, as the three of us noshed on homemade banana cookies on the couple’s deck, a rooster crowed somewhere nearby.

Healthcare was a big issue because of Patti’s MS, but Rob said he was "amazed at how relatively little health insurance costs," despite Patti’s pre-existing and chronic condition. They pay just over $300 per month for a plan that covers them both. Back in Michigan they were spending more than $500 per month.

Overall, the Hoffmans estimate that their living costs are down by at least a third since relocating to Madeira.

"But the real impact for me is that I’m like a new person," Rob said. "I never did fruits and vegetables until I lived here. I’m walking everywhere. I also do ‘walking soccer’ for guys over 50. I feel healthier, I feel more connected to people in the community. We are not going back to the US. Just look at this island… who would want to leave?"

"One of the Loveliest Small Cities in Europe"

Funchal’s cobbled streets are lined with hand-laid mosaics, hillside gardens, and centuries-old chapels.
Funchal’s cobbled streets are lined with hand-laid mosaics, hillside gardens, and centuries-old chapels.|©iStock/Cristian Mircea Balate

I left Rob and Patti and headed into Funchal. Honestly, it’s one of the loveliest small cities I’ve visited in the 36 European countries I’ve traveled through.

It’s not London, Paris, or Barcelona by any stretch. But it offers all the big-city amenities, from shopping malls, hypermarket food stores, and so many of the brand-name retailers found across the continent to a number of high-quality hospitals, medical facilities, banks, and even some Michelin-starred restaurants.

Plus, Funchal has the benefit of being urban eye-candy.

The downtown core is Old World Portugal—low-rise, white-stucco buildings, red-tile roofs, gray cobblestone streets with inlaid designs in black stone, jacaranda trees with their purple blooms everywhere…

The picturesque and compact Chapel of Corpo Santo dates to the late 1400s, while many of the other local buildings stretch across the 16th to 19th centuries. Pedestrian streets run rich with shops and restaurants with a heavy emphasis on local seafood. At night, Portugal’s traditional fado music—a sad and melancholy longing for love and life lost to the past—spills into the alleys.

But unlike central Lisbon, Funchal’s leafy Old Town is noticeably clean and orderly, not overrun by derelict buildings, graffiti, and homeless migrants. In some ways it feels like Disney designed an old Portuguese city and stuck it on a small island in the Atlantic.

My wife and I hopped on the cable car that rises 15 minutes up a mountain to the fetching Monte suburb. (Hint: Go early in the morning or late afternoon, otherwise prepare to wait in a massive line.) As the cable car rises, Funchal unfolds—those red-tile roofs crawling up the mountain, verdant gorges and ravines bisecting the landscape, the Atlantic stretching out past the horizon.

The entire island feels like a portal to a primordial past, with Funchal as the modern overlay doing what it can to keep the palms and ferns and jungle foliage from reclaiming territory lost to those pesky humans. Given that Madeira is an island, I expected to find prices to substantially exceed the mainland because of the added transportation costs.

How wrong I was.

I popped into a Pingo Doce, a Portuguese grocery chain I regularly shop at back home in Lisbon. I snapped pictures of all kinds of items I’d normally buy just so I could compare prices back home. Madeiran prices were the same, if not slightly cheaper in most instances. Gasoline was slightly cheaper too. Same with housing. An unquestionably nice two-bedroom, two-bath apartment with stunning views out over the city, the mountains, and the Atlantic was less than $1,600 per month, and it includes parking (a true perk in Portuguese cities, where roads are narrow and finding a parking space is a blood sport).

While in Funchal, I met with another American couple: Kathy Vandelaare and her husband Jim. They, too, are from Michigan—from the Detroit area. For them, Portugal was a chance to reclaim a sense of safety, which they lost in the US after their son died from fentanyl poisoning; and to stretch their retirement nest egg farther after having lost a large chunk of their financial future when the US economy collapsed back in 2007-08.

"An Out-of-Body Experience"

Café life and color in the heart of Funchal, Madeira.
Café life and color in the heart of Funchal, Madeira.|©iStock/pawel.gaul

Portugal had been on the couple’s radar since 2015, when a colleague told Kathy she and Jim should consider it as a potential retirement destination. (That colleague had shared stories from International Living over the years.)

"That’s where our interest really began," Kathy said over a lunch of fresh fish on a restaurant patio overlooking the small church they attend (it offers an English-language mass once a week).

Like the Hoffmans, Kathy and Jim are disenchanted with America’s degrading political situation. As Jim said: "You have to be in the right huddle. You have to pick political sides."

And like the Hoffmans, the couple settled on Madeira in part because of the weather. The Algarve, Kathy says, "is too hot." Porto and Braga up north, too rainy during the colder winter months. They liked Aveiro—2.5 hours north of Lisbon, and often called the Venice of Portugal because of its canals—"but there’s winter and wet weather there, too."

While staying in Porto for a few months, Kathy took off on her own to spend a weekend in Madeira. "And it felt like I had an out-of-body experience. It felt right. It was a sign," she said.

They found a lovely 1,025-square-foot apartment in the heart of Funchal—three bedrooms, two baths, four patios, with what Kathy calls "killer views of the mountain." Cost: $1,500 per month.

"What we have here, we couldn’t afford in the US," Jim added. "Our cost of living—it’s got to be about half what it was back home." I asked him how long he thought their nest egg might last in retirement, given what happened to their finances during the Great Recession.

"In the US," Jim said, thinking for a beat, "probably eight years. In Portugal, the rest of our lives." He figures their costs are "easily about half of what we were paying back home."

At various points in our conversation, Jim and Kathy returned several times to quality of life on Madeira. "Versus any typical American suburb, this is simply better," Kathy said. "We could never afford in America the lifestyle we can afford here. You do have to be OK creating a new social network, and that can be scary, but this is just a great place to live. So pretty. So safe."

Kathy said she’s found so many expat groups in Funchal that, "I can do something twice a day, five times a week, each with a different group. So, you’re definitely not going to be lonely here."

Her expat groups include Madeira Friends, Madeira Foodies, and Madeira Girls Gone International. They appeal to multiple nationalities, including Americans, Brits, Canadians, South Africans, and many more. (Note: English, as I learned from driving all over Madeira for a week, is widely spoken across the island.)

As Jim sums it up: "Madeira delivers all we want and at a cost that we can sustain."

"Wow—Look at That!"

Quiet coastal towns like Porto Moniz offer natural swimming pools and slow-paced charm.
Quiet coastal towns like Porto Moniz offer natural swimming pools and slow-paced charm.|©iStock/Balate Dorin

During my week touring every corner of the island, I found myself—more times than I can recall—turning to my wife to say, "Wow, look at that" (often with some George Carlin words my publisher would frown on in print).

It’s the only place on the planet where that has occurred with such regularity that I actually noticed how often my wife and I were commenting on the unexpected beauty of some mountain or ravine… or waterfall or black-sand beach… or one of the many other sights I don’t have space to catalog.

I mean, there’s a reason that Madeira regularly wins accolades as Europe’s best, most in-demand beach destination.

The island really is that pretty.

If you do decide to disregard my plea to stay away, then at least heed my advice to rent a car and drive all over Madeira.

Here, narrow roads sneak up, down, and through jungle-y landscapes with so much foliage it blocks out the sun… tunnels burrow through looming mountains, cliffside highways barely clinging to the sides above or jutting from the mountain bedrock on ginormous pylons… and the sea crashes on sometimes rocky, sometimes sandy beaches far below. Everywhere you come upon views that make you say out loud, "Wow—look at that!"

You gotta see it all to truly appreciate what Madeira offers in such a compact space.

One morning I awoke early because I wanted to visit the Fanal Forest of ancient laurel trees that are estimated at 800 years old, and which now are part of a UNESCO World Heritage site. I left our hotel on the beach in Calheta and headed 14 miles and 1,200 feet up into the mountains.

At the beach, my rental car registered a temperature of 75 F.

When I reached the parking lot that serves as the gateway to the forest, the display told me it was just 46 F. Moreover, the forest was shrouded in a moody, Scooby Doo fog punctuated by short bursts of thumping rain. It’s a truly mesmerizing place, particularly if you arrive before the crowds… or after they’ve left for the day and you have this entire, ethereal forest all to yourself. (Just bring wet-weather gear and waterproof hiking shoes because rain is common up here.)

Twenty minutes later, I was in Porto Moniz on the far northwest coast, flying my drone over picturesque natural swimming pools the ocean has carved from volcanic rock over the millennia.

When my family and I return to Madeira—and we absolutely will—we’ll base ourselves in Porto Moniz, a lovely little town of less than 3,000 people, hemmed in by the Atlantic and a large mountain pressing up against the town’s backside. It’s a quiet and almost painfully pretty place to settle in for a few days.

Several nice hotels are here, including Aqua Natura Bay Studios, as well as some tasty restaurants. My wife and I pulled into Pedra Mole, an absolutely no-frills roadside eatery up the side of a mountain overlooking Porto Moniz below, and shared a fabulous mound of beef, chicken, and sausage grilled on an outdoor patio right next to us.

Plus, the island is so small that from Porto Moniz you can drive to Funchal, on the opposite end of the island, in just under an hour… though I bet it will take you much longer because you’re going to want to stop so many times to take pictures and videos of what you’re seeing—friends and family back home won’t believe how truly gorgeous Madeira really is.

I can only urge you to refrain from doing so.

Assure them that the place is a hell-hole. Ugly. Vulgar. Unappealing at every level. An island slum rightly dumped into the Atlantic Ocean!

Sadly… I know you won’t do that.

I know that when you see what I’ve seen, you’re going to eagerly share the beauty of this place with the people in your world. Meaning that as much as I love what Madeira is today, I know it’s going to change. The Americans on the island know it’s going to change.

So, I guess, see it now before it’s over-touristed.

Madeira is popping up so frequently in the travel press and among social-media travel influencers that in June United Airlines began offering thrice-weekly nonstop service between Newark and Funchal. The seasonal summer service runs June through September, and it means that for Americans, Madeira is now 6.5 hours away—only slightly longer than New York to L.A.

That’s going to ramp up Americans’ exposure to this island, which means it’s going to ramp up demand among Americans looking to retire to one of Europe’s prettiest and most tropical locations.

It also means real estate prices and rents are likely to start shooting upward too.

But for now, Madeira remains a gem.

Just don’t go and see for yourself.

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