The Levada Less Traveled

By LeeAnne Clark, Freelance Writer

January 2007

You know that old saying, “You can’t get there from here”? Well, in the case of our hotel on the Portuguese island of Madeira, I almost proved it true – three times.

The first leg of our mother-daughter journey brought to mind the immortal words of the Steve Miller Band, from their song “Jet Airliner”: “You’ve got to go through hell before you get to heaven.” At least, I HOPED heaven was on the other side of this hell! Note to self: avoid Air France like the plague. Those were the smallest, most crammed seats I’ve ever had the misfortune to spend 10.5 hours wedged into. And I’ll never forgive the bonehead who decided that all airline seats must have a padded headrest at the top, which forces height-challenged folks like me to tilt our heads downward at an unnatural, neck-cricking angle. After a transatlantic in this position, I became intimately familiar with every carpet stain within close proximity. Sleep? HA!

We had a six-hour layover in Paris, during which we had to make our way from Charles de Gaul to Orly airport. I’d planned on popping into Paris to perhaps enjoy a croissant along the Champ d’ Elysees. Yeah right. It took us most of that six hours to collect our luggage, crawl through Parisian rush hour traffic, and pass through Orly’s security. Oh well, I did manage to catch a brief glimpse of the Eiffel Tower in the far distance during the shuttle ride. After another few hours on a significantly more comfortable Air Portugal flight, we finally arrived in Madeira at 1:30 am local time.

Now we had to get to our hotel, the Estalagem Eiro do Serrado in Curral Das Frieras. It’s at the top of a mountain reached by a thousand 180-degree switchbacks, driven at breakneck speed by a cab driver who seemed way too energetic to these two exhausted, cranky women. If I’d had the energy I might have asked him to slow down to warp-4 – at least when we were negotiating hair-pin turns on the edge of a cliff. By the time we reached the hotel and were walking on firm ground, we wobbled around like kids who’d spun too long on a rope swing.

Given our hotel’s eagle perch on the side of a mountain, we were pretty sure there would be spectacular views once the sun came out. We pondered that for a full three milliseconds before passing out on our beds.

The next morning we realized that Steve Miller was right. We were now in heaven. At least, we appeared to be up in the clouds. Having rushed to the balcony eager to see what the view would look like in the sunlight, I threw open the drapes and saw….WHITE! We were totally socked in with thick, roiling fog.

Soon, however, the fog began to dissipate and we could see a charming village a couple thousand or so feet below. Now I knew we really WERE in heaven – no place on earth could be this breathtakingly beautiful! It was truly eye-popping – steep, craggy vertical mountainsides dappled with green, with the deep valley floor between them dotted with a jumble of white buildings topped with red tile roofs. You could see a road snaking down the mountainside to the village, clinging to the steep cliffs as it wound its way down.

I really wanted to go for a run to shake out my stiff muscles, and I spied a path through the woods just below our balcony. I figured this was one of the levada walks that I’d read about.

Levadas are basically mini-canals that act as an irrigation system to distribute rainfall from the wet north of the island to the drier, sun-parched regions of the south, delivering precious water to banana plantations, vineyards, orchards, and hydro-electric plants. The levadas cover a total distance of 2500 km, and date back to as early as the 16th century. The famous levada walks are winding, wooded trails alongside the levadas. Although they were constructed primarily for agricultural/industrial use, levadas are widely used by tourists and locals who want to enjoy outdoor adventure activities inaccessible by cars.

I found the entrance to the levada, which started at a slight incline just below the hotel. What I hadn’t realized was that it then made a 180-degree turn and headed the other way, steeper this time – and again, and again, steeper each time. Evidently this levada went straight down the mountainside to the village far below! Entranced by the thickly-wooden path, I clambered on down, skirting steep drops and scrambling over spots where rockslides had covered it with boulders. It took me 30 minutes to run to the bottom. Then I turned around and looked back up at the hotel – what had I been thinking? It appeared as a ghostly apparition far up in the puffy clouds, like a vacation resort for angels on holiday from their heavenly duties. How was I supposed to get there – fly? It took me almost two hours to make it back, most of it climbing rather than running. I was quite proud of myself when I finally made it – although I knew my backside would punish me later.

After showers we hit the road in a rental car. Starting south to Santo Antonio, we picked up a freeway and headed west, skirting the sunny southern coast where resorts lined the beaches. In Ribeira Brava we left the highway and headed north into the mountainous center, where the roads got steeper and windier through the mountains and valleys. We passed through Encumeada up to Sao Vicente on the north coast. Here we stopped in a nice seaside village, and had lunch at a sidewalk café next to the crashing waves.

While there we visited the caves of Sao Vicente. They are actually interconnecting lava tubes, which were quite fascinating and very different from any caves we’d ever seen – unlike limestone caves, there were no stalagmites. The most interesting feature was the melted ceilings – spots where a lava flow had stopped in an existing tube, and the heat from the new lava melted the solid ceiling to form shiny black drips.

Next we headed south back into the island interior, where we seemed to climb forever, well into the clouds that clung to the peaks. Now that was an E ticket in itself – driving through thick, fast-moving fog on windy roads where a cow might be standing in front of you in the mist at any turn. We saw amazing waterfalls and, when the clouds parted, stunning views from the pinnacle of the island.

I wanted to cut across the island interior to our hotel rather than driving all the way back down to the south shore, along the freeway and then back up. My eagerness to locate a shortcut had much to do with my now-protesting backside, which was telling me in no uncertain terms that it’d been sitting in a car for far too long. According to the map we were on a north-south road marked in red, indicating a major road. Our hotel was off another north-south red road to the east, maybe 15km away, connected by a dotted-line blue road. It looked like we could pick up that road nearby at Encumeada, so I drove there. But the blue road wasn’t where it should be! That’s the problem with this darn island – none of the roads are marked, except by names of towns that they head towards. And none of them said Curral Das Frieras. I couldn’t even find a road heading east! I drove in circles searching for the blue road, eventually hitting speeds that would have made last night’s cabbie proud. At one point I spotted a sign that actually said “Curral Das Frieras,” but it

Finally I stopped at a small bar where a few friendly young men were happy to help. I indicated where we were on the map, and where I was trying to go, and they said – you guessed it – I had to head all the way back down to Ribiera Brava and take the freeway up to Santo Antonio – exactly what I was trying to avoid. But, I protested, that was ten times the distance it would take if I could just find that blue road. What about that blue road??

They all started laughing.

“That’s not a road, Ma’am,” one said.

“Then what the heck is it?” I asked.

He smiled and held up his fingers and did a little let-your-fingers-do-the-walking thing.

Suddenly the light bulb went on…it’s a LEVADA! Mom just about fell out of the car laughing. Now she keeps doing the little finger-walk thing whenever she thinks I’m getting too big for my britches.

Note to self – when traveling in foreign countries, learn to read maps before attempting to drive off a cliff.

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