Portugal’s first Age of Discovery landfall still makes fortified wine
Madeira, an autonomous Portuguese region about 805 kilometres southwest of the mainland, was claimed in 1419 for Prince Henry the Navigator and settled after 1420—the first territorial find of the Age of Discovery. Roughly half the people live in Funchal on this Macaronesian archipelago.
The group—Madeira, Porto Santo, the Desertas, plus administered Savage Islands—sits under 400 kilometres north of the Canaries and 520 west of Morocco on African tectonic crust. It is Portugal’s most populous and densely settled island and a year-round resort; British visitors numbered about 148,000 in 2021 and Germans 113,000. Laurel forests hold UNESCO status beside the namesake fortified wine.
Plutarch’s Sertorius anecdote (c. 75 AD) already relays sailors’ tales of idyllic Atlantic twin isles. The Arab geographer al-Idrisi tells of Lisbon adventurers who found an island full of sheep with bitter, inedible meat. Archaeology suggests possible Viking landings between 900 and 1030 before the permanent Portuguese colony. Fourteenth-century charts, from the Medici-Laurentian Atlas of 1351 to the Soleri portolans of 1380 and 1385, already mark the islands under names such as Legnami, the isle of wood. A legend even has two English lovers, Robert Machim and Anna d’Arfet, wrecked on its coast in 1346.
In 1418 a storm drove two of Prince Henry’s captains, Tristão Vaz Teixeira and João Gonçalves Zarco, onto an island they called Porto Santo, holy harbour. Returning the next year with Bartolomeu Perestrello, they spotted a dark cloud bank to the south-west and found the larger island behind it, naming it for its timber. The three men and their families governed three captaincies, Funchal, Machico and Porto Santo.
Early settlers grew wheat and later shipped it to Portugal, but when harvests fell Henry ordered cash crops instead. After the first water-powered sugar mill arrived, output passed 6,000 arrobas by 1455, guided by Sicilian experts and funded with Genoese money. Political autonomy flows through the region’s Administrative Political Statute as an EU special territory alongside the Azores.
Source: Madeira
