Madeira

The north and the south of the island feel like two arguments about the same landscape. The north is wetter and greener, with steep valleys cut by fast streams, roads that hang off the cliffs, and villages whose houses face the water with their backs to the wind. The south opens out. Its slopes are warmer and more cultivated, its towns busier and more settled, and the sense of weather arriving from somewhere else is weaker. Porto Santo, reached by its own short passage across open water, is a different thing altogether: flatter, drier, with a long pale beach and a low skyline that makes the mountains of the main island seem to belong to another place. The high interior is the odd one out, a plateau of old laurel forest where the trees are hung with moss and the paths are soft underfoot even in summer.

Funchal is the place most people arrive in, and it wears its history plainly. The old quarter has cobbled lanes, painted doorways and small churches with tiled panels, and the covered market is a loud, crowded room where fish lies on ice with its eyes still bright and fruit is stacked into pyramids that tilt when someone bumps the table. The cable car climbs from the seafront to the hills, and from the top the city looks like a spill of white and ochre down to a harbour full of cranes and cruise hulls. A proper day here begins on a levada, the narrow stone-lined channels that carry water across the hillsides to the fields. You walk beside the moving water on a path barely wider than your shoes, under dripping trees, past a farmhouse with washing out and a dog that does not bother to bark. Later the coffee comes in a square where the pigeons are bold, and the afternoon can end on the rocks along the coast, where lava shelves run into deep pools and men in plastic chairs fish with the patience of people who have nowhere else to be. Sea and mountain are never far apart here, and the change between them can take twenty minutes in a car.

Leaving is harder than the guidebooks suggest, because the island does not give up its hold quickly. You find yourself thinking about the levada long after the sound of its water has faded, and about the way the cloud lifted at dusk to show a lit coastline below. The wish to stay is not really about beds or views. It is about the way the land keeps changing its mind, from green to dry, from steep to flat, from forest to sea, and how each change arrives as if it had always been waiting for you to notice it.