The Madeira flower festival takes place in April every year after Easter to celebrate springtime when the flowers are at their peak. Most towns decorate with wreaths, or banners, or walls of flowers. We waited until Sunday to visit the capital city Funchal where the Flower festival parade was to take place.
The city is large and the streets are steep and a winding maze. We parked on a side street and walked down (a very steep descent) to the harbour front. Along the seafront are many cafes and restaurants. We stopped and had an espresso, which has become a daily start to our mornings, and then did a walking tour of the city center of narrow cobbled streets lined with restaurants and tourist shops. Being Sunday, all the museums were closed. We stopped to see the Se Cathedral built in 1491. Many of the old city homes have painted doors, and there appears to be a real mix of demographic everywhere – large and small homes, well maintained or derelict, or abandoned homes side by side.
We hopped on the gondola (16 euro round trip) to go up above the city to the village of Monte (1800 feet above Funchal), where there is the Monte Palace Tropical Gardens. The garden is a 3 story exhibit of sculptures, koi ponds, trees and flowers. There is the Monte Palace Museum built in the 18th century which has been well preserved, a cafe where we had a free Madeira wine tasting, and two temporary exhibits of African wood carvings. All very well laid out and with signage to tell the visitors what flowers or trees they are seeing.
From the village of Monte there is another gondola which goes halfway down the mountain (for another fee) to visit the Funchal Botanical Gardens, but we decided to skip this in order to get back to Funchal in time to see the Flower festival parade.
On the gondola going back down to Funchal we saw the crowds of people already waiting for the parade to begin. They had roped off a large area about 1 km. along the harbour front street and had erected a bandstand. Floats lined the street and hundreds of local residents were dressed in very colorful costumes depicting the various colors of the native flowers. Dresses, hair, hats, and floats all decorated very beautifully.
After driving back to Calheta we went to dinner in town at a reastaurant called New Era which overlooks the marina. We had reserved ahead and so they seated us at a table on the patio beside a heater. We had to of course try the local dishes – limpets (snails) served in there shells with a light butter garlic sauce and espada (black scabbard fish) which is a flaky white fish. The service was good, the typical laid back way they seem to have here, slow and casual. Prices were not bad – tipping here is not a thing but we have been giving 10% tips because it is what we are used to. It hasn’t been refused by anyone yet.
