Rock stars
Rapidly shrugging off its reputation as a genteel destination, this volcanic island is enticing visitors with opportunities to explore what lies beyond the glorious flora and fauna. Time to discover the burgeoning food, wine and art scene
The number seven has a special significance in Madeira. Although there have been many famous visitors, from Christopher Columbus to Winston Churchill, there is but one superstar son, Cristiano Ronaldo. If visitors can’t be tempted by a little yellow duck with his shirt number on it, they are invited to at least rub an intimate part of his life-size bronze statue for luck. It’s like throwing your three coins in a fountain but with an extra wink. Not, perhaps, what one might expect in a destination more associated with sedate perambulations in the soft air and soothing sea breeze, but it’s a glimpse of an infectious local joie de vivre and party spirit. Nice but dull, it ain’t. Despite the proximity of the African coast, it is the Portuguese ‘mainland’ that exerts the magnetic pull on this small volcanic island, one of four making up the Madeira archipelago, rising precipitously from the Atlantic. The interior of Madeira Island still has a mythic, dawn-of-time quality: rainbow nation flowers and emerald forests bisected with towering peaks; Tolkienesque gorges and crumpled ravines; charcoal pebble beaches, terrifying cliffs and grey-red rocky basalt outcrops.
Recent years, however, have seen a cultural sea change. The island is now the focus of myriad adrenaline-rich activities, which means it’s possible to hike above a magical valley of creeping clouds with a soundtrack from the rare sea bird Zino’s petrel, explore a fairy-tale world of lichen moss and ferns, mist and rivers, and then go big-wave surfing in the same day.
In tandem with its commitment to sustainable tourism comes a lively generation of islanders who are reinvigorating its food, art and social life. In many areas, women are leading the way, having broken the glass ceiling of the traditionally male-dominated wine industry, while avant-garde designers like Nini Andrade Silva have transformed the look of the built environment. Three dynamic young women – aka The Three Cousins – have opened Prima Caju in Funchal’s Old Town with a menu that is a notable exception to the chips with everything tourist cliché (although you can’t deny Madeirans are passionate about potatoes), endearing themselves to locals and visitors who appreciate wraps, sushi and buddha bowls and a funky, fun atmosphere.
Funchal’s erstwhile sedate promenades, inlaid with patterns of black volcanic and white limestone, the manicured gardens draped with drifts of pink blossom, are dotted with street art and contemporary sculptures: the calendar is packed with as many cultural festivals and sporting events as saints’ days.
Nonetheless, it is not necessarily the first place one associates with an extraordinary culinary experience – one where the boundarypushing, rule-breaking and quite thrilling cooking of a tiny obscure restaurant crashes upon the unsuspecting diner’s palate like the Atlantic waves beyond. Yet here it is.
Selim Latrous is The Wanderer. Like centuries of travellers before him, the half-Tunisian, half-Swiss chef found Madeira a welcoming berth between voyages from all points of the maritime compass. It also helped that he was ‘fond of bananas’, as he says only halfjokingly, especially the sweetly aromatic dwarf Madeira variety.
Completely self-taught ‘from the internet and my own imagination’, Selim opens his one-room, one-table restaurant one night a week for an ever-evolving multi-course
menu. It’s rooted in local produce, foraged herbs and flowers, using ingredients such as varieties of mushrooms or berries that, he says, even the locals don’t know about. ‘To my mind, the new luxury is not lobster and foie gras but a carrot from a rural garden harvested in its maturity, then transformed in the kitchen,’ he says. In doing so, he supports young farmers and producers via dishes that match delicacy, intensity and complexity of concept. There are modernist references, but Selim is creating his own one-man culinary show. The result is serious stuff but also homely, honest and friendly. At the other end of the scale, Ruben Freitas aka ‘The Van Man’ runs the healthy eating Vantastic food truck in Funchal. Bursting with evangelical enthusiasm, he changed his whole attitude to nutrition after suffering a basketball injury. ‘It’s still a challenge to raise awareness, but I want to encourage people to slow down and consider the beautiful landscape and all the wonderful flavours we have here,’ says Ruben. ‘I’ll provide you with a picnic and a blanket so you can go up into the mountains, watch the sun rise and just enjoy life. What could be better?’ Until bees took over his life, Miguel Vieira was a civil engineer. He now makes Flor do Norte honey from hives scattered around the island, and has worked with the University of Madeira to develop a luscious range of multifloral varieties enhanced with walnuts, cinnamon sticks and berries from the Unesco-listed ancient laurel forest that carpets two-thirds of the island. He is happiest when attending the hives: ‘The love of nature is in my heart; with the bees my mind is clear and tranquil. Every morning, I have an orange from my tree and a spoonful of honey. That is happiness,’ he says. The islanders are proud, industrious, courteous and hospitable. They have had to be exceptionally strong and hardworking to carve out the terraces across the towering terrain and construct the labyrinth of levadas or irrigation canals. These are fed from the dripping, cloud-covered laurels that act like
Clockwise from top left: Vinhos Barbeito wines; a barrel for biologico (organic) varieties; Rua de Santa Maria, home to the famed painted doors; Uau Cacau’s artisan chocolates; local scabbard fish, served with crostini and fresh cheese at Saudade Madeira in Funchal’s Rua João Gago; a flower seller at Mercado dos Lavradores; family bakery Fábrica Santo Antonio; Prima Caju’s chocolate and avocado mousse; traditional Funchal doorway
‘In the streets women proffer bunches of aromatic thyme, bay, chamomile. Fennel, from which Funchal gets it name, grows wild, its essence captured in boiled sweets’
sponges to water the Hobbit-sized plots planted in geometric rows like an edible matrix. Farmers still scale impossible heights by foot to work land that is too narrow and vertiginous for even a donkey, never mind a tractor. It helps to explain why many islanders once travelled as seasonal workers to the steep slopes of Jersey in order to cultivate the new potatoes.
Fertile volcanic soil plus three geographical zones and several micro-climates equal a tiered and profuse system of agriculture in between the neat cubes of terracotta-roofed houses. At the tropical level there are bananas, sugar cane, custard apples, yams, sweet potatoes, avocados, mangoes and 15 types of passion fruit; the Mediterranean level provides figs, oranges, lemons, grapes, prickly pears, maize, wheat, rye and barley; at the ‘European’ level there are cherries, apples, plums and nut trees, plus vines and three crops of incomparable potatoes.
Traditional food is rural and hearty: old school and old world with varying degrees of refinement. In the spectacular Curral das Freiras (Valley of the Nuns), renowned for morello cherries and sweet chestnuts, a morning’s hike would be incomplete without the reviving burn of homemade cherry brandy and a meaty broth of chestnuts and beans as served at the Sabores do Curral. In winter, there are game stews: duck, rabbit, quail, red-legged partridge. Year-round, espetada – giant charcoal-grilled laurel skewers of beef seasoned with sea salt, garlic and bay leaves – are suspended from hooks at the table like kebabs on steroids.
Ever-present are tomato and onion soup topped with a poached egg; deep-fried cubes of cornmeal; salt cod stews with cabbage; and roasted sweet potatoes drizzled with cane sugar syrup served with bolo do caco (round flatbreads) and garlic butter.
At Funchal’s three-storey art deco farmers’ market, Mercado dos Lavradores, the essential mid-morning snack is a roll filled with pork loin marinated in wine, vinegar, garlic and bay leaves (technically a Christmas speciality but enjoyed year-round). Brave the multiflavoured assault course of passion and dragon fruit samples, and break cover with a queijada pastry stuffed with cheese and a shot of spine-stiffening coffee - and you might just work up an appetite for lunch, goes the Madeiran joke.
In the airy, tiled fish market the mongers weald piratical blades to dispatch the iridescent parrot fish, bream, red mullet and swordfish, alongside more idiosyncratic seafood flavours like crusty barnacles, giant flying squid, tiny ebony winkles to be steamed with garlic, parsley and chilli, and little limpets in their star-shaped blue shells. But one’s attention is drawn to the macho slabs of harpoon-caught skipjack tuna and many rows of villainous-looking, coppery-black scabbard fish, with long slithery bodies that hang over the counters like cat-o’-nine-tails. Their fanged mouths and menacing stare deceive: the flesh is light and agreeable, usually fried and served with bananas or passion fruit.
In the streets, women proffer bunches of aromatic herbs as they have done for years - thyme, bay, parsley, chamomile. Fennel, from which the city gets its name, grows wild and its essence has been captured in boiled sweets from the Fabrica Santo Antonio since 1893. The family bakery also makes delicate biscuits and a spicy, molasses cake, packed in a box based on an old Huntley & Palmers tin and traditionally served during festivities with a glass of malvasia.
Until recently, however, this was one of the few times locals would actually drink Madeira. As Leandro Gouveia of Barbeito, one of the island’s finest and most forward thinking of the wine houses, explains: ‘In the past the best bottles were always exported, or it was produced in bulk for cooking Madeira sauce. Then it became associated with old people, but increasingly young people have come to understand this wine is unique. The grapes,
soil, salty air, gulf stream winds and producer skills combine to make a wine you can’t find anywhere else in the world.’ A handful of English shippers such as Blandy’s have long dominated the transatlantic trade: in the New World Madeira was favoured as a toasting wine by Washington, Hamilton and Jefferson. Today, thousands of small growers’ vines, packed on tiny plots on near-vertical slopes, climb over pergolas, sheltered by bamboo and broom windbreaks. If cultivation seems improbable, then production breaks all the rules: under-ripe grapes, deliberate heating and oxidisation plus a minimum of 20 years in the barrel before it can be labelled ‘vintage’. Yet the result has been called one of the world’s most mystical and miraculous wines.
Versatility is a clue to its enduring popularity. It can be a dry aperitif or sweet dessert wine (splendid with chocolate) with the flavour spectrum covering nuts, caramel, burnt sugar and citrus peel. A bottle is remarkably long-lasting: a few years ago a 1796 bottle was auctioned for £11,500 – and was still drinkable.
Island rum has also made its mark internationally. The product of an even older plant, sugar cane, it is an essential ingredient of poncha, a frothy, potent drink as emblematic of the island as embroidery and wickerwork. Made with aguardiente, honey, lemon and orange juice, this forerunner of punch and grog dates from colonial times when lemon was preserved in rum to prevent scurvy. Poncha may now include many other fruity flavours but the golden rule is that it must always be freshly made. They say it cures everything from a cold to a broken heart. And, after four glasses, your Portuguese will be perfect: ‘Saúde e atrás da rede, Cristiano!’ Cheers and back of the net!
Clarissa Hyman and Mark Parren Taylor travelled to Madeira courtesy of Discover Madeira. madeiraallyear.com