Madeira, Car tours and walks

Description

The walkers’ guide to Madeira for more than 30 years and a winner of the Thomas Cook Best Travel Guide Award, this book has been thoroughly revised for the current 13th edition to take into account the fires of August 2016 (with a couple of replacement walks). The maps have also been improved with waypoints, and there are free downloadable GPS tracks for all the walks.

The book guides the visitor across the island by car and on foot. But it is primarily known as a walking guide. The Sunday Times said, ‘A remarkable paperback which may have done more than any other to change the way its readers spend their holidays: this book single-handedly turned levada-walking into something approaching a craze.’

‘Levadas’ are watercourses that carry rainfall from the mountains to irrigate the cultivated terraces, and they have totally captured the imagination of visitors to the island – whether walkers or not. Many people use the book just to picnic or stroll in the idyllic surroundings beside a levada.

But Madeira is also one of Europe's top destinations for mountain walks. With this in mind, a couple of years ago we concentrated on re-walking all the high-level routes – especially important in view of the path collapse on the major traverse from Pico do Arieiro to Pico Ruivo – the island’s top walk. In this edition we have been more concerned with the devastating 2016 forest fires north of the capital and on the Paul da Serra.