This is our first full day on Madeira after flying Minneapolis to Toronto to Lisbon to Funchal, overnight, etc. etc. We powered through a half day of walking around town eating pizza and trying some local drinks. We had to go see the statue of Cristiano Ronaldo to see if it was as bad as it was in the pictures!

It was… Next ask yourself the question, why is his crotch extra shiny?? There is so much to do in Funchal, that I can already see we could have spent a week here easily. We did try the Madeira wine as we were walking around. Just eating our way through all the local places could take more than a week.

We all made it past 9pm! Today we woke up around 7am local time. 1AM CDT. We had an extremely aggressive hiking plan for today and immediately realized we had to tone it down. So we opted for the Levada das 25 Fontes. A levada is an irrigation channel or aqueduct specific to the Portuguese Atlantic region of Madeira. Basically they are small channels designed to bring the rain water from the upper elevations to the region around Funchal and other areas that need the water. We saw the water flowing through channels along the roads as we climbed our way toward the start of the hike.

The first part of the hike was great, it was right along the Levada with great scenery lovely trees and greenery. Quite an engineering project if you ask me!

After about 4 miles of hiking we found ourselves at the actual 25 Fontes part of the hike! The usual way to the start of the hike was just a boring walk downhill on a very narrow road. So this way was much better and more interesting. But by then we were pretty tired from the long rough descent, so we only did a small part of the original hike.

By the time we finished it was 2:00 in the afternoon and we hadn’t really eaten anything other than a few snacks. So we picked a lovely restaurant down by the sea to stop for a delicious lunch!

The view was amazing and the food was great also! Brian had Scabbard fish, Jane had baked Octopus, I had Portuguese black pork and Holly had Tuna steak. All deliciously prepared over an open fire. We all shared and all the dishes were really good.

By the time we got back to our AirBNB we were ready for showers and then happy hour. At happy hour we tried the Poncha and some Portuguese green wine, and a cheese plate. We played a game of Qwirkle at another local establishment and called it a night at 10pm! Tomorrow is another HUGE day of hiking.