Madeira, the Island’s Lesson
A dispatch from the Portuguese island at the heart of an Erasmus+ project «Enhancing Cognitive Skills and Social Well-Being through English Learning for Seniors»
LANDING ON THE SEA
There is a moment, just before the descent onto Madeira, when the aircraft seems to hold its breath. At a certain point there is no longer any land beneath the wing, only the ocean, and the runway appears all at once like a shelf suspended in mid-air: a ribbon of asphalt that does not rest on the island but reaches out over the Atlantic, held up by a hundred and eighty concrete piers as tall as a twenty-storey building. Most first-time arrivals do not yet know it, but they are about to experience one of the most famous and feared approaches on the planet.
The reasons for that reputation pile up like strata of volcanic rock. The first is the wind. The island sits planted in the middle of the Atlantic, five hundred kilometres north-west of Morocco, geographically closer to Africa than to the Portugal it belongs to; and the ocean currents strike it without meeting any obstacle. The second reason is the mountains: Madeira is a volcanic ridge that rises steeply out of the water, and when the ocean air slams against those walls it curls into unpredictable turbulence, crosswinds that change direction within seconds. The third reason is the runway itself. Originally it measured barely sixteen hundred metres; in 2000 it was extended to almost two thousand eight hundred by building, where the coast ran out, a viaduct reaching over the sea – a feat of engineering so daring it earned an international award for outstanding structures. Only specially trained pilots are allowed to land here; and even today a gust can force them to climb again and come back round, while passengers grip the armrests and a few, they say, rediscover their faith in ninety seconds.
And then there is the name. Since 2017 the airport has been called Cristiano Ronaldo International Airport, dedicated to the island’s most famous son, the man who put Madeira on the map for people who had never thought to look for it. It is one of those details that say a great deal about a place: the champion who grew up in a poor neighbourhood of Funchal has never severed the bond with his homeland. His generosity is made above all of gestures directed at health and childhood – funds for the oncology centre that treated his mother, hospital wards and medical equipment, his work as an ambassador for organisations devoted to children around the world. So the island that opens under the banner of football reveals itself, right from the airport sign, as a place where individual success returns in the form of collective care. A good omen, one is tempted to think, for someone arriving precisely to talk about people’s wellbeing.
FUNCHAL. THE AMPHITHEATRE ON THE OCEAN
Funchal, the capital where roughly a third of the island lives, has the shape of a natural amphitheatre: it climbs the hills up from the harbour, and its brick-roofed houses look like tiers arranged around the stage of the ocean. Seen this way, from above, it is a vertical city — which is why a cable car sets off from the port area to carry up those who would rather not tackle the climbing alleys; as you ascend, the gardens and cobbled lanes of the centre gradually give way to steep ramps that scramble towards the mountain. Down below, along the sea, cruise ships dock where the great ocean liners once called; the pavements are laid in black and white basalt, and the architecture has the slightly absent-minded elegance of seaside towns that have watched many stories pass through.
It is a city with a habit of changing trade without throwing anything away. The fortifications raised against pirates have become museums; the old wicker toboggans, once a practical means of carrying farm produce down to the valley, are today a tourist descent that makes you laugh and tremble a little. Even melancholy has left its mark. In the nineteenth century Funchal was a renowned health resort: the island’s pure air was believed to cure certain illnesses, and a procession of European nobles came to breathe it. Among them was the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, the celebrated Sissi, to whom the city has dedicated a statue. Higher up, in the sanctuary of Nossa Senhora do Monte, lies the last emperor of Austria-Hungary, Charles I, exiled here after the Great War and dead of pneumonia in 1922 in reduced circumstances: beatified in 2004, his tomb is still a place of pilgrimage from every corner of the world. And yet this city of exiles and convalescents is also capable of dazzling joy: its New Year’s fireworks, which light up the harbour through a full three hundred and sixty degrees, have entered the Guinness Book of Records as one of the largest on the planet.
THE LESSON: LEARNING HAS NO AGE
But the reason for this journey was not the scenery. Right here, in the heart of Funchal, we lived through one of those experiences that stay with you. As members of the Fondazione Giuseppe Levi Pelloni of Rome, we took part in the second meeting of the European project «Enhancing Cognitive Skills and Social Well-Being through English Learning for Seniors» – strengthening the cognitive abilities and social wellbeing of older people through the learning of English – funded by the European Union under Erasmus+. The initiative weaves together three countries and as many organisations: the Polish Fundacja EDUNET of Rzeszów, the project’s lead partner, headed by Tomasz Stadnik; the Fondazione Giuseppe Levi Pelloni for Italy; and the Portuguese Centro Cultural e Desportivo de São José, the host. In Madeira the close-knit Italian team was led by its president, Pino Pelloni, and included vice-president Paola Sonnino, the author of this text (who is in charge of the website and the Italian section of the e-book project), Ilaria Pisciottani (who took the photographs that illustrate this piece), the polyglot interpreter Ute Geremias and Eleonora Rosati.
The meeting took place in the classrooms of the Portuguese centre, as guests of the São José association, and for a few days English stopped being a subject and became a team sport. The older participants worked with active-learning methods: exercises to loosen tongue and shyness at once, digital materials, language games, little sketches to act out and, above all, activities built around the culture and traditions of the three countries. The backbone of it all was the e-book created by the project, a kind of shared atlas gathering the geography, history, customs and cultural heritage of Poland, Italy and Madeira: a book that grows as you use it, and one meant to remain even once the suitcases are unpacked.
The liveliest part, though, lay not in the materials but in the people. All week the three associations — the Polish, the Italian and the Portuguese — worked side by side, and around the centre’s tables the differences of language dissolved into gestures, laughter and a surprising ease in understanding one another. The older people, who elsewhere might have been reduced to being “looked after”, were here the true protagonists: each brought their own story, their own country, their own age, and it was precisely in mixing them that learning was born.
What gave all this its institutional depth was the meeting with Dr Pedro Araújo, president of the Junta de Freguesia do Imaculado Coração de Maria, the parish that hosts the centre. Araújo described the initiatives through which the local administration cares for its older citizens: social programmes designed to counter loneliness and exclusion, two silent enemies that old age knows all too well. It is the same conviction that drives the European project: that learning, being together, feeling part of a community are not luxuries but medicines. And the e-book, in this sense, is more than a manual: it is proof that a network of distant cities can build something that lasts.
THE CAPITAL UP CLOSE: STONE, FAITH AND THE FUTURE
Guided by our hosts, we came to know Funchal up close as well, one stone at a time. You begin where the city is most alive: the Mercado dos Lavradores, the covered market where in the morning a light breeze drifts in through the doors and colour explodes on every stall. There is pink-and-gold pitaya, the pineapple-banana, the pitanga, the cherimoya, and there are proteas as large as sculptures; the air smells of fresh ocean, of flowers and of citrus.
A short distance away rises the Cathedral – the Sé, from the Latin for “episcopal seat” — built between 1493 and 1514 at the behest of Manuel I. It was one of the first great churches raised in Portugal’s overseas territories, and it remains one of the few in the Manueline style — Portuguese late Gothic – to have come down to us almost intact. From the outside it is sober, almost austere, with its dark stone portal and its tower clad in glazed tiles; but it is inside that it reveals its secret. The ceiling is its masterpiece: an inlay of local wood — the island’s cedar — worked in the Mudéjar style and enriched with insets of ivory, hung above the nave like an upturned sky. All around, the gold of the altars kindles the half-light. To raise your eyes towards those vaults is to feel, for a moment, small before history: five centuries of prayers, of shipwrecks and of homecomings have gathered beneath that dark wood, in a city that has always lived facing the sea.
A few steps on, history changes trade once more, and here we are at the church of São João Evangelista which, together with the adjoining Jesuit College, tells perhaps the most surprising chapter of this continuity. The Jesuits arrived in Funchal in the sixteenth century and founded here, in 1569, a college destined to become for centuries the intellectual heart of the island: they taught grammar, theology and the sciences, formed generations of Madeirans and left a deep mark on local culture, before the order was expelled in 1759. The college church, with its Baroque altars sheathed in gold and azulejos, remains one of the richest interiors in the city. But it is the ending that strikes one most. That building, used over the centuries as a school, a barracks and a military headquarters, now houses the rectorate of the University of Madeira — officially founded only in 1988, yet rooted in a place where teaching has gone on since the sixteenth century, and today able to forge alliances with cutting-edge universities for research into artificial intelligence. From the Jesuits who taught Latin to the algorithms that learn by themselves: it is the portrait of an island that, rather than demolishing its own past, chooses every time to build upon it.
BEYOND THE CAPITAL: THE ISLAND AND ITS ROOTS
But Madeira is not only Funchal. A few kilometres along roads that coil between sea and mountain are enough to uncover an island made of villages, each with its own stubborn identity. At Santana, on the northern slope, you come across the casas de colmo: tiny triangular houses with thatched roofs sweeping down to the ground, painted red, white and blue, once peasant dwellings and today a living postcard of the oldest Madeira. To the west, clinging to a bay, is Câmara de Lobos: a fishing village whose name — “chamber of the sea wolves” – recalls the monk seals that once colonised it. It was here, in the 1950s, that Winston Churchill came to set up his easel: the light on the water and the brightly coloured boats hauled up on the shore won him over, and his paintings made this corner of the world famous.
To understand these villages you have to go back to the beginning, for the story of Madeira, like many fine stories, begins with a storm. In 1419 the Portuguese navigator João Gonçalves Zarco, who had set sail under the patronage of Prince Henry the Navigator towards the African coast, was driven off course by a gale and found shelter on a small island he named Porto Santo, “holy harbour”, in gratitude. The following year its neighbour appeared on the horizon, wrapped in a forest so dense and dark that it earned the name Madeira: “wood”. Colonisation began in 1420 with families from the Algarve and a number of convicts. To wrest farmland from the forest, the settlers set it alight; and tradition tells of a fire that burned for seven years. On the ash and the volcanic soil, under a sky mild all year round, first wheat took root, then sugar cane — at the time as rare and precious as a spice — and finally wine, destined to become famous across half the world. In 1508 Funchal was raised to the rank of city by King Manuel I.
Behind this prosperity lies an immense labour. It was largely slaves who terraced the vertical slopes where the vines still grow, and who dug the levadas, the more than a thousand kilometres of channels that still cross the island today. For centuries Madeira remained a world of utterly isolated mountain villages, often without roads, reachable only on foot after days of walking. The turning point came only recently: from the late 1970s, with the regional autonomy won after the Carnation Revolution, and above all from 1985, when Portugal’s entry into the European Community brought the funds that made it possible to double the road network and bore hundreds of tunnels through the mountains. Journeys that had taken eight hours shrank to one or two. Within a few decades the island went from being one of the poorest regions of Portugal to one of the richest, and tourism — today more than a million visitors a year — knocked agriculture off its throne at the head of the economy. The airport suspended over the sea is the latest chapter of this same stubborn determination to defeat geography.
And then there is the geography, which on Madeira turns almost to poetry. The island is often sold as a land of sun, but its real magic is made of water. They call it the island of eternal spring, and the secret lies in a perfect cycle: the ocean evaporates without pause, the vapour meets the high ground and is pushed upward, forming clouds that release their rain on the peaks. Without this breathing the island would be a desert in the middle of the sea. It is the Laurisilva that holds and gives back that moisture — the ancient laurel forest declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site: with an internal humidity above eighty-five per cent, it is a green sponge dripping water from every centimetre and, at the same time, a book of natural history showing how the Mediterranean looked millions of years ago, before the ice ages.
That forest is also a treasure chest of biodiversity. Isolated in the middle of the ocean, Madeira has evolved species found nowhere else on the planet: endemic trees, ferns and flowers, rare birds such as the trocaz pigeon, a botanical wealth that makes the island a true Atlantic garden, where the subtropical flora of Funchal’s parks lives alongside the primeval laurel of the heights. As you climb, the landscape changes again: at the highest peaks – Pico Ruivo and Pico do Arieiro, above eighteen hundred metres – you often walk above the clouds, along paths that run over knife-edge ridges, while the mist rises and falls like a curtain, revealing and hiding the precipices. To the east, the São Lourenço peninsula offers the exact opposite: bare rock, yellow and ochre, lashed by the wind, a finger of arid land reaching out into the Atlantic. It is in this play of contrasts — the green and the stone, the mist and the sun — that the island’s true soul lies hidden.
THE CENTRO DE SÃO JOSÉ, ENGINE AND SOUL
If there is a thread that holds all this together – the classrooms, the walks through the city, the excursions out to Santana and Câmara de Lobos – that thread has a name: the Centro Cultural e Desportivo de São José. It was the Portuguese centre, as host, that served as the engine and soul of the whole week, with work so passionate, competent and generous that it went well beyond the running of a conference. It is led by two women, the true engine and soul of the project on the Portuguese side: its president, Barbara Benedito, and her deputy, Sofia Freitas.
It was they who accompanied us on the visits that punctuated our days: the churches of the centre, the villages that seduced Churchill, the museum that guards the island’s history. But more than any monument, what stayed with us was the hospitality. On Madeira, warmth is not a formula of courtesy: it is a way of being in the world. They welcomed us as one welcomes someone coming home, and in that welcome there was already, at heart, the lesson of the project – that learning, at any age, is first of all a matter of relationships.
The next step will be to receive the Portuguese and Polish partners in the Italian capital, for the final leg of a journey that will continue until 2027. But part of this trip is already etched in memory: the island you can reach only by gliding in over the sea, suspended between mountains and ocean, has taught us that the hardest thing — landing, starting over, learning something new at any age — is also the thing that rewards you most.
Sebastiano Catte*
*Ilaria Pisciottani, who took the photographs accompanying the article, also contributed.
