Journalist from DIÁRIO launches today an unpublished work on the Levadas of Madeira

Tobi Hughes·
Madeira News

Over the 270 pages, the author traces a journey through the history of Madeira’s levadas

Today, at 5.30 pm, at the Electricity Museum – Casa da Luz, in Funchal, the launch of the unprecedented book ‘Levadas da Madeira – Uma Herança para o Mundo’, by Marco Livramento, journalist for DIÁRIO.

The presentation of this work, which will surely become a regional historical reference, will be made by Susana Fontinha, coordinator of the preparatory work for the candidacy of Levadas da Madeira to World Heritage.

The book, which is published by Empresa Diário de Notícias, has a preface by Susana Prada, regional secretary for the Environment, Natural Resources and Climate Change, and will have a version in Portuguese and another in English, whose design and layout work is the responsibility of by Ricardo Ferreira.

This work was created with the aim of tracing the history of the levadas in Madeira over time, dividing the approach into five time periods, which correspond to as many chapters.

From Diário Notícias

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Tobi Hughes

14 Responses

    1. From the text “will have a version in Portuguese and another in English” it seems to be versions in both languages.,

    2. Sorry Toby,
      I’ve just read that there is an English version. I didn’t read the article properly. My brother is going to be in Madeira from the 14th March. Where could he buy a copy from?

  2. Someone should publish a photo book on all of the dangerous and unkept portions of all of the levadas. I love the levadas and other walks all over Madeira, but I have not been on even one of them that was not in disrepair in one shape or form. In this book, there could also be a history of how many people have died, gone missing or have been seriously injured, highlighting the places with the most deaths and injuries.

      1. You also have the White Cliffs of Dover, do you not? Here, there are makeshift guardrails near sheer cliffs where the bottom of the guardrail has been dislodged, so you hold on to it for stability and find yourself out over a cliff waiving in the breeze. Or you’re on a levada walk which is cm away from the edge of a cliff and your footpath is washed out completely and you need to walk up into the woods. Next time you come, someone has put a board over it. There are also downed trees on some of the walks (for months or years) and you need to do a detour off of the pathway in order to continue. I am only mentioning the safer problems here. There is serious tourist money coming into Madeira. It would take a fraction of it to repair the levadas and make them safer without taking away from the rustic beauty and feel of the walks.

  3. Excellent work I will be enjoying discorving the history of the Madeira Levadas and I hope they manage to be reconize be Unesco World Heritage Convention .

  5. This is great, I will definitely be getting a copy on our next visit

    I have also been intending to visit the Electricity Museum, but missed out last time because of the opening hours (closed on Sunday)

    I hadn’t thought of the levadas as likely to be a major topic in the museum, as I had assumed that they had originally been built for irrigation

    I also assumed that there must have been some slave labour involved, and that there may have been little appetite to make that more widely known

    1. The slave labor is the former system here of uneducated and unfortunately sometimes illiterate human beings doing all of the grunt work and dangerous jobs while the nobility and gentry were carried up the mountains in hammocks (being carried by these same unfortunate poor people.) It was sort of a caste system and in many ways it seems to continue to this day. I think that is one reason that in spite of Madeira’s beauty and charm, many young people bolt out of here because the opportunities for a better life appear better in other places.

      1. My great grandparents bolted from Funchal, taking my grandfather to the US. My grampie started working as a baker at age 13, and eventually opened his own Portuguese Bakery on Cape Cod. I want to return to Madeira. My elders left for a better life and found it. But “better” means many different things. I want to understand how we can preserve what I love about Madeira while helping Madeiran people to have a viable future.

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