It’s Easter. A big thing in Portugal and on Madeira. People accept the extra measures, some grudgingly, but let’s be honest: it seems to work. Madeira seems to have Corona under control. In the week running up to Easter there were hardly any new infections, and the ones there were concerned people who had come…
Category: the island
everything to do with the island
Madeira quarantine: 3 weeks now, but life goes on…
The third full week of the Madeira quarantine is now behind us. The restrictions continue to be firmly in place: social isolation, no travelling unless for shopping, going to the bank or travelling for medical purposes and only leaving your home for physical exercise or walking your dog. Nothing really happens, we follow the developments…
Social isolation on Madeira: closer to you
Social Isolation is the flavour of the week where it comes to measures against the spreading of our very own modern time plague. Over the express roads, the matrix signs tell you Fique em Casa, stay at home. Police are patrolling and may ask you where you are going, where you live, will move you…
War and peace or a day on locked down Madeira: halfway through the first week.
Some readers like my articles. I like writing them. So here goes again. In these times between war and peace nothing much happens, it is down to the mundane things that determine daily life. Strangely, there is a veil of normalcy that covers the abnormality of everything going on. Since we can’t really go out…
Madeira Life under Lockdown
Many of our friends overseas have been wondering how we are, and how we cope with life on Madeira under lockdown, which is, in practice, what the state of emergency entails. Frankly, it really looks like panic and sensationalism have come to a halt since we have received clear rules that belong to the state…
State of emergency for Madeira
So what we expected already happened yesterday: the state of emergency for Madeira – and in the whole of Portugal – is a fact. That all sounds pretty scary, but it’s only really scary if we don’t know what it all means for us. We had to wait a while for more news, but last…
Madeira free of Coronavirus
Update of june 12, 2020 Since this article was first published on March 5th, a lot has happened. Of course, with the first signs of covid-19 arriving on the Island, we all were very worried. If the virus would have had free range here, it would have ended in an uncontrollable disaster. Health care is…
Walking the Levada do Norte: from Boa Morte to Serra de Agua
Living in Madeira, albeit part-time, from November through April, is a lovely experience. But there are some days that are extra special, like yesterday when we did ‘one of these walks’. Now, we have posted many stories about our walks already, especially in the Dutch pages and I had reached a point where I thought…
Levadas: one of Madeira’s best-known features.
Anyone who has ever visited the Portuguese Island Madeira knows that one of the best-known features of the island is the network of levadas. But there aren’t many sites that explain what these levadas are for, how and when they were built, how their maintenance is done and by whom, and what their significance is…
Christmas Lights in Funchal
If we, in the North, are already excited if Christmas decorations appear before the first of Decembeer, here in Madeira decorations of houses and gardens start early November, and in the city of Funchal and elsewhere the first work teams of the municipality appear to put on Christmas lights. We always wait until very close…
