🌅 Reading list

Madeira for First-Time Visitors

The short shelf that gets you ready for the island — one great guide, the walks, the wine, a little history and a story to read on the plane.

Cover of Madeira Walking Guide
🥾 Hiking & Levadas

Madeira Walking Guide

John Underwood, Pat Underwood · 2026

The long-running Sunflower Landscapes guide to Madeira: 100 long and short walks plus 6 car tours, with large-scale topographic maps and downloadable GPS tracks. The latest (16th) edition.

Cover of Madeira: The Islands and Their Wines
🍷 Madeira Wine

Madeira: The Islands and Their Wines

Richard Mayson · 2022

The standard modern reference on Madeira wine. This comprehensively updated edition covers the islands’ history and geography, the vineyards and winemaking, a guide to current producers and shippers, and tasting notes on more than 400 wines. Shortlisted for the André Simon Award.

Cover of Madeira: A Short Illustrated History
🏛️ History & Culture

Madeira: A Short Illustrated History

Joana de Freitas · 2015

An accessible, illustrated overview of Madeira’s history — from its 15th-century discovery and settlement through the sugar and wine economies to the modern era — produced with the Madeira Story Centre in Funchal.

Cover of Madeira: A Botanical Melting Pot
🌺 Flora & Gardens

Madeira: A Botanical Melting Pot

Susanne Lipps, Oliver Breda · 2006

A colour-illustrated botanical pocket guide describing 166 typical plants of Madeira, organised by habitat — gardens and parks, the coast, cultivated land and levadas, the laurisilva forest and the mountains.

Cover of Tango in Madeira
📖 Fiction & Literature

Tango in Madeira

Jim Williams · 2013

Set in Madeira after WWI, a disillusioned ex-soldier tries to rescue his family’s failing wine business as the island fills with real figures of the era — an exiled emperor, Agatha Christie at Reid’s Hotel, George Bernard Shaw learning to tango — and a murder draws him in.