The Things We Don't Know: Madeira

It's amazing how you can live for six decades and change, and never know where Madeira is.

All I knew was that it's an island, part of Portugal, and it's known for wine.

I assumed it was fairly close to Portugal, but that turns out not to be the case: it's closer to Morocco, and pretty far out in the Atlantic altogether. 

It didn't have consistent human habitation until about 1420, which also surprised me. When you think of all the Pacific islands that humans found and inhabited many centuries or millennia ago, the fact that the islands in the Madeiran archipelago were found multiple times but never permanently occupied until that late seems odd. I mean... the Vikings couldn't make a go of it there? What, too warm?

I didn't know that it's a big tourist destination, not just for the Portuguese, but also the British and Germans. Cruise ships come a-calling, of course. 

And it has irrigation channels called levadas, which aren't elevated aqueducts, but were cut into the mountains and mountainsides to carry water from the wetter part of the island to the dry part in the south. That was back in the 16th century.

Part of the reason they needed irrigation was to grow food, of course, but also to grow sugar, which was a major export crop from Madeira before that exploitative agricultural system outgrew the small islands and expanded to the Western Hemisphere in Brazil and the Caribbean. 

Today, there are about 250,000 residents in Madeira, with about half of them living in the capital city Funchal... which I also never heard of before today.

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Photo by JOEXX, CC BY-SA 3.0.