Day 6: Ribeiro Frio

It was a rather wet and windy day when we woke up this morning in Madeira. It definitely wouldn't have been a good day to drive to any mountain viewpoints, but I thought it might be suitable for a forest walk I had on my list of walks in Madeira that aren't prohibitively difficult. We drove uphill from Funchal, halfway across the island until we reached the small settlement of Ribeiro Frio. We'd driven through a lot of cloud and rain on the way, but when we parked in Ribeiro Frio things seemed to be brightening up a bit.

As soon as we'd parked the car, I saw a sign for the hike we'd come to do. The plan was to walk towards a viewpoint called Balcões and one of the key reasons I'd chosen it was because it was described as being a "flat" walk. I soon began to feel that flat had a different meaning in Madeira, as we started to climb high above the road.

And we kept climbing!

We did get some atmospheric views of trees as we climbed.

This part of Madeira is famous for a type of forest called Laurisilva, which is dominated by trees from the laurel family.

This sort of forest would have been common in prehistoric times, but is now largely extinct in Europe.

The forest remaining in Madeira has been designated as a World Heritage Site and has apparently been here for at least 1.8 million years.

After a while the path we were following flattened out, which was a relief.

I was expecting the walk to be about 1.5km each way, but sooner than I expected we found ourselves at the Balcões viewpoint.

We were just on time to glimpse a rainbow.

It was so beautiful

The views from the viewpoint itself were incredible too.

It was a very long way down to the river in the bottom of the valley.

And you could really get an idea from here of how huge the forest is.

Once we'd finished admiring the views, we set off back towards the car.

We were walking alongside a levada, one of the irrigation channels which Madeira is famous for.

This one had a nice wide path next to it, which is another reason why I'd chosen this walk. I didn't fancy hiking on a narrow path with a water channel to the side of me

I realised around this point that I'd accidentally taken us on a shortcut, climbing uphill to intercept the walk halfway through, and that a (very flat) path continued further through the forest.

The autumn colours here were really beautiful...

...though the path was a bit wet in places.

Eventually the path emerged onto the road, 10 minutes uphill from where we'd parked our car. We strolled down and popped into a restaurant across the way where we were planning to get a quick coffee. Once inside, however, it looked so nice that we ended up staying for lunch.

In addition to an amazing spaghetti bolognaise, I finally managed to try some Madeira wine. It was very sweet (and strong!).

We couldn't choose between the puddings on the menu, so decided to order two and share half of each. Tim started with what was essentially a cheesecake version of a pastel de nata.

Meanwhile I had the most incredible pineapple! It had been baked with honey and cinnamon, which was lovely, but the pineapple itself was amazing too; really, really sweet.

As we were paying, we got presented with two free shots of cherry liqueur. I drank both and it was really nice; very sweet and a strong taste of cherries.

It had been raining while we were eating, though once we emerged from the restaurant it seemed to have brightened up a bit again.

We drove back a different way, along some of the northern coast and then through multiple long tunnels to get back across the island to Funchal. The southern side of the island was still decidedly damp at this point, but later in the evening the weather began to improve.

It was still quite windy though and this was reflected by big waves in the sea.

I hadn't realised while walking through the pedestrian tunnel the other day that there are a couple of windows in it where you can look down at the water.