Funchal as a Madeira base: what is in the city and what is reached from it

The short answer

Funchal is the capital of the Madeira archipelago, in a bay on the island's south coast.[1] XTOUR treats it as the island's base, which is a planning choice, not a statement that the island's sights are in the city. Visit Madeira, the Madeira Promotion Bureau's site, describes the municipality as covering 76.15 km² and ten parishes: Imaculado Coração de Maria, Monte, Santa Luzia, Santa Maria Maior, Santo António, São Gonçalo, São Martinho, São Pedro, São Roque and Sé.[1]

That list settles two questions of containment. Monte, with its church, its tropical garden and the upper station of the cable car, is a parish of Funchal, not a separate town; Cabo Girão is in the neighbouring municipality of Câmara de Lobos.[12][1] XTOUR does not give hotel, neighbourhood or transport advice, and publishes no travel times between Funchal and anywhere else on the island.

In the municipality, or reached from it

The rows rest on the pages cited in the sections below; distances between them are not travel times, and XTOUR publishes none.

The old centre, in the city's own words

The Câmara Municipal do Funchal tells the city's founding through its town hall. Its history page says the first settlers arrived between 1420 and 1425 under the first captain of Funchal, João Gonçalves Zarco, and that D. Afonso V made the settlement a vila (town) around 1453 or 1454.[3] The same page says a provision of 4 June 1485 marked out the Campo do Duque for "a large church, a square and council houses", that the council house was begun around 1486 and ready in 1491, and that D. Manuel raised Funchal to a city by a letter of 21 August 1508.[3] Visit Madeira gives the same date for the city charter.[1]

The council has not always sat in the same building. The history page says it moved in the first half of the 19th century into the Carvalhal Esmeraldo palace, built in 1758, bought it in 1883, and had it remodelled in 1940 to a general design by the architects Raúl Lino and Carlos Ramos. The blue-and-white azulejo panels in its entrance, the page adds, are signed "Batisttini", as the municipality spells it, and were made at the Fábrica de Maria de Portugal in 1940.[3] Visit Madeira credits the 1940 tile panels on the Mercado dos Lavradores, which it says was inaugurated on 24 November 1940 to a design by Edmundo Tavares, to the same Battistini factory of Maria de Portugal.[5] XTOUR's reading is that the town hall's entrance and the market both carry 1940 tile panels from the same Battistini workshop; neither page says how the work was commissioned.

The cathedral, and a date the pages do not agree on

Visit Madeira says the Sé has been a National Monument since 1910 and stands in the city's historic centre; it describes a Gothic portal of Cabo Girão stone with eight pointed archivolts and a ceiling of island cedar worked in Mudéjar style.[4]

Three official pages tell its beginning differently:

• Visit Madeira says it was first built by order of King D. João II in 1493 and completed by the early 16th century.[4]
• The city's home page says D. Manuel, Duke of Beja, raised a new church, "begun in 1493, later raised to the rank of cathedral", and that Funchal became the seat of a bishopric in 1514.[2]
• The city's own history page says the Igreja Grande was begun "around 1500".[3]

XTOUR does not choose between 1493 and around 1500, or between D. João II and D. Manuel as the patron. What the three pages share is that the church was built in the late 15th or early 16th century and later became the cathedral.

Monte, the parish above the city

Monte is part of Funchal. Visit Madeira lists it among the municipality's ten parishes, and the cable car operator's two stations, Funchal-Monte on Rua Dom Carlos I and Monte-Funchal on Largo das Babosas, both carry Funchal postal addresses.[1] The operator's site sells e-tickets that it says are valid for 60 days after purchase. Its own list of points of interest at Monte includes the Monte Palace Tropical Garden and the Igreja do Monte, which it describes as holding the tomb of Charles I of Austria.[7]

Visit Madeira describes Monte's church as an 18th-century building in the highlands of Funchal, and says the body of Charles I, Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary, who died at the Quinta do Monte in 1922, rests there. The same page says the parish's festival of Nossa Senhora do Monte begins with novenas on 5 August and ends on 14 and 15 August; XTOUR has not read a programme for any year.[6]

The Monte Palace Tropical Garden has its own operator and sells its own tickets. Its site gives it 70,000 m², with a museum of modern and contemporary art and minerals at its highest point.[8] Visit Madeira places it south of Monte's church and traces the property from the English consul Charles Murray in the 18th century to Alfredo Guilherme Rodrigues, who bought it in 1897 and built the residence that later became the Monte Palace Hotel.[9]

The Madeira Botanical Garden appears on a public body's pages. The IFCN, the regional forestry and nature institute, lists it among its own public service points, at Caminho do Meio, Bom Sucesso, in Funchal.[10] Visit Madeira says it was created in 1960 on the Quinta do Bom Sucesso, established by the Reid family in 1881, and that it also houses a Natural History Museum and a herbarium.[11]

Reached from Funchal, not in it

Cabo Girão is outside Funchal. The IFCN says the Cabo Girão protected area belongs to the municipality of Câmara de Lobos, and Visit Madeira describes Câmara de Lobos as a separate municipality with five parishes, placing Cabo Girão and its suspended glass platform there.[13][12] The Sé's portal, Visit Madeira says, is built of Cabo Girão stone, which is the only link between the two that XTOUR states.[4]

Pico do Arieiro, spelled Areeiro on the tourism board's site, is where PR1, the Vereda do Areeiro, begins its route towards Pico Ruivo. Visit Madeira lists it under "Madeira Peaks" rather than under a municipality, and XTOUR has not read which municipality it lies in, so it is recorded as reached from Funchal and nothing more.[14]

The island's classified walking routes follow the same rule. The IFCN's list names the Câmara Municipal do Funchal as the manager of three of them, PR3 Vereda do Burro, PR3.1 Caminho Real do Monte and PR4 Levada do Barreiro, and the IFCN itself as the manager of most of the others; a manager is not a location, and XTOUR does not place any route inside the city. The same list keeps Porto Santo's routes separate, because Porto Santo is another island.[15] The booking and fee rules are in Madeira's classified walking routes.

What XTOUR does not know

XTOUR has no hotel, area or price information for Funchal, no bus, taxi or road information, and no travel times from the city to Cabo Girão, Pico do Arieiro or any walking route. It does not publish opening hours or ticket prices for the cathedral, the gardens, the cable car or the market. It has not read any tourism pages published by the Câmara Municipal do Funchal.

For the island's walking rules, see Madeira's classified walking routes; for the rest of the country, the Portugal travel guide and the Portugal country page. The Funchal destination page holds the places listed above.