Evening 7: Funchal Christmas lights

I'd read online that 1 December was going to be the day the Christmas lights were switched on in Funchal. We'd seen workmen starting to put them up during the week, so once darkness fell we set off on the walk into town to see what we could see.

We didn't have to walk too far before we came across trees decorated in brightly coloured lights.

There were lights in all the colours of the rainbow!

As we came to the area with posher hotels, the lights became a bit more tasteful.

Soon we could see the suburbs of Funchal spread out on the hills in front of us.

The bridge we crossed into the city centre was decorated with these beautiful shooting stars.

The trees here were decorated with white lights...

...and one of the hotels had its own Christmas display with angels.

Never mind the Christmas lights, seeing the normal street lights of Funchal at night made it clear how steep some of the roads we'd been driving on have been.

We spotted the flag of Madeira lit up on a hill above us...

...and got an even better view of the steep streets. We'd had to negotiate our way down this hill on our way back from Ribeira Frio today.

We were now in the port area which is home to the Cristiano Ronaldo musuem.

He was born in Madeira and the main airport is named after him. There's also a big statue here.

We could see from here that the entire harbour area was lit up with bright colours.

I loved these wreath decorations along the promenade; we'd seen men installing them on Wednesday.

In the centre of town we found lots more illuminated trees.

I loved the way the palms had lights wrapped all around their trunks.

In the harbour itself we found a bright blue light display, reminiscent of waves.

From a bit of a distance they were even more spectacular.

The town centre was home to a huge Christmas tree made out of lights.

We realised once we'd been looking at it for a while that it was changing colour.

The blue was my favourite...

...but the silver was also pretty cool...

...and I liked the red as well.

While we were waiting for the tree to change colour, we realised that one of the waves was displaying the flag of Madeira.

We also caught sight of Christmas greetings in different languages illuminated along the pier.

Meanwhile the Christmas tree turned pink...

...and green.

We even had rainbow colours at one point!

All in all it was a really spectacular display and I'm so glad we walked into Funchal to see it