The island of Porto Santo

Oporto Santo is also called “the Dorée island” (in Portuguese: Ilha Dourada) because of the desert color of its landscapes and its long sand beach gilded.

In summer, it is especially burned and yellow, and its russet-red cliffs also made it call “the fawn-coloured island”.

The island is accessible by ferry from Madeira; at the end of the 20th century, an artificial harbor at the end is sand beach, Oporto de Abrigo succeeded the unloading dock exposed to the storms going back to 1928 which is him with broad capital of the island.

One reaches also Oporto Santo by plane, his airport (Airport of Oporto Santo) civil having a track of 3,000 m: from Madeira (in 15 min), Lisbon and Oporto in particular. The airport extends according to a North-South axis on the only true plain from the island: important cultivable ground surfaces and vineyards were sacrificed to him; it separates the two sites from hills of Oporto Santo.

The center is the largo do Pelourinho, pretty planted triangular place of palm trees, around whose beautiful white buildings are drawn up, of which the church and an emblazoned building sheltering the town hall.

Only part of the building, the Gothic of the capela da Morgada, projecting vestiges the south of the church, survived the many incursions of the pirates. This vault dates from the 16th century: the scene in earthenware squares of the external wall is a modern addition.

The church shelters the only work of art of Oporto Santo: a Portuguese painting of the 17th century, “Holy Marie-madeleine and Christ”.

It is a masonry full with atmosphere, out of coarsely cut stone, and one can easily imagine Christophe Colomb living here. There is not any doubt that Colomb remained on the island since he married Felipa Moniz Perestrelo, girl of the first governor of Oporto Santo, Bartolomeu Perestrelo; but it is not at all obvious that it lived here. This House of Colomb did not exist such as it is at the time of the discoverer of America, but it is imagined that the house of the governor was about at this place.

The visitors of the museum find themselves plunged in the universe of Christophe Colomb, follow his routes on the charts or examine an astonishing collection of portraits of the heroes carried out well after the time of Colomb.

Largo do Pelourinho, broad the rua Infante D. Henrique, bordered of palm trees, leads to a garden where the statue of Christophe Colomb is drawn up. From there, one can also reach the pier, from where one discovers an overall picture on the city.

On the hill four restored windmills rise, pointing out the three dozen mills and the cereal cultures of formerly; only one mill still turns; it is built on a rotary base to collect the wind.

This “fountain of sand” is located near curious cliffs at the strange forms carved by erosion, which dominate a rock and wild coast. Instead of the usual dark volcanic rock, the slopes precipice dominating the coast raise here a beautiful yellow it is with this clear calcareous rock and the power of the erosion which the island owes its sand beach “gilded”.

Fortifications which formerly protected the island from the pirates, it remains only of old rusted guns. The airport of Oporto Santo extends just downwards.

The Point of Calheta is separated from the small island of Baixo (Ilheu de Baixo) by a dangerous master key strewn with shelves where the sea foams, this point forms a pleasant site with its roughcast beach of black basalt rocks.

On the side of the pico of Anna Ferreira, you will discover one surprising formation of basaltic organ springing towards the sky.

In Funchal, Colomb had been put at the current various problems of navigation which will encourage it later to leave on a tour of world. In the borough of Baleira Villa, one still sees the house surrounded by palm trees where the large navigator would have remained.

When the sight is well released and that one is on the wet and green island of Madeira, one realizes of the desert aspect of Oporto Santo one distinguishes especially from the hills brown-gray and the arid regions. Except the winter, where its fields reverdissent under the effect of moisture, it oneself calcareous of Oporto Santo, completely deprived of vegetation, the ocher color of a desert gives him.

Its relief is rather flat: it consists of a large plain where draw up themselves, in the North-East and south-east, some “peaks” of which highest, the pico Fascist C (peak of the torch), culminates only to 517 m of altitude. When one scans the horizon in the North-East in clear weather, one distinguishes from north and the east as from the more high summits of Madeira the silhouette of the close small island there still, from abrupt cliffs emerge brutally from the sea and of the frayed summits draw up themselves with far.

The climate is soft - annual average: 19° - and drier than in Madeira.

The agricultural production is poor, partly because of chronic lack of water, and the fields, formerly maintained, are now left with the abandonment, in favor of tourism.