Madeira Island
— — an island the year forgot to leave.
Not only on a wall.
“A volcanic island in the North Atlantic, six hundred miles southwest of Lisbon, where the year is always something close to spring. Levadas thread the laurel forests above Funchal, carrying water from the wet north slope to the terraced vines below. The fog comes in early most afternoons. The light, when it returns, is the colour of a green sea pulled through glass.
Madeira Island, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Madeira is the main island of a Portuguese autonomous region in the North Atlantic, about 1,000 kilometres southwest of Lisbon and 700 kilometres west of Morocco. The island measures roughly 741 square kilometres and rises steeply from the sea to Pico Ruivo at 1,862 metres. It is volcanic in origin, settled by Portugal from 1419, and home to about 250,000 people. The capital is Funchal on the south coast. The native laurel forest, known as Laurissilva, was inscribed by UNESCO in 1999.
More than 2,000 kilometres of narrow stone irrigation channels, the levadas, thread the island. They carry water from the wet northern slope to the drier south-facing terraces where bananas and vines are grown. The oldest sections date to the fifteenth century. Footpaths beside them have become the island's main hiking network. The PR9, a six-kilometre walk along the Levada do Caldeirão Verde, ends at a waterfall fed by mist rather than rain. Most days the cloud sits between 600 and 1,200 metres.
The Madeiran climate is unusual in the Atlantic: mild and slow-moving, with monthly averages varying only about seven degrees between February and August. Locals talk about the island as eternal spring, and the seasonal markers are botanical rather than thermal. The jacarandas of Funchal flower violet in May. The wine harvest comes in late August on the south slopes. In autumn the laurel canopy of the upper forest stays green while the chestnut groves above Curral das Freiras turn copper.