In anticipation of a visit to the island of Madeira in 2017, I consulted Sacheverell Sitwell's Portugal and Madeira (pub 1954), and found much unchanged: “The Ancients may have known of the Cape Verde and the Canary Islands, but no one had ever settled on Madeira. It was a virgin island. There were no aboriginal inhabitants to exterminate. It is an island to which you go for the flowers and the climate, seductive and captivating.” Flower-sellers with bouquets of frangipani awaited visitors disembarking on quayside at Funchal: “The flowers are as though formed of seashells, of a texture like double cream, vegetable and leathery but like the leather of an underbelly, and of elusive scent...older, deeper, warmer than turberose or gardenia, a scent that fulfils its name and paints the legend....Walking away from Funchal along the coast road you come to banana groves and groves of sugar-cane. The tropical richness is nearly indescribable. The Hesperidean orchards come down and touch upon the sea. Here and there, with aerial gourds hung in their branches, are paw-paw trees...In a moment or two you are in the mountains. Now are to be seen the extraordinary system of terracing, and the levadas or water courses by which the hillsides are irrigated. Tall reeds or cañas grow along the sides of the ravines. Banana glades and groves of sugar-cane are left below, and we are in the territory of the trellised vines. They overhang both sides of the road and must be twelve or fifteen feet high. They are like rows of open booths with low entrances where you can but crawl inside, their trellises heavy with the black grapes; grapes, grapes, to the left and right, and every way you look, so that with a loaf of bread a day you could live in luxury and eat nothing else but the black bunches.”
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