Monte

Monte is what happens when you take a cable car eight minutes above a city and arrive somewhere that has been pretending to be a different century for a while and doing it convincingly. The village sits at 550 metres above Funchal in a climate noticeably cooler and wetter than the harbour, the air smelling of camellia and damp stone, and the baroque church of Nossa Senhora do Monte dominates a staircase of steps flanked by hydrangeas. I arrived on a Tuesday morning just as the clouds were burning off, and the church glowed white in the early sun in a way that made the whole scene feel slightly theatrical and completely earned simultaneously.

The Monte Palace Tropical Garden is the kind of place you give yourself two hours for and need four. It climbs the hillside above the town in a series of terraces and themed gardens — a Japanese section with koi ponds and bamboo groves, an African section with cycads and aloes, long panels of azulejos depicting Portuguese history mounted along stone walls, a display of mineral crystals in cases like a private museum that someone carried up a mountain because they could not imagine leaving it below. The aesthetic is maximalist and completely without apology, and it works because the plants are genuinely remarkable: tree ferns eight metres tall, African tulip trees in full flower, banana palms heavy with unpicked fruit, a camelia section in February that is almost aggressively beautiful.

The toboggans are the famous thing everyone is slightly embarrassed to mention and then does anyway because they are genuinely fantastic. Two carreiros — toboggan drivers in white trousers and straw hats — push and steer a wicker sled down a public road at speeds that feel, in the moment, genuinely irresponsible. The run is about two kilometres and deposits you in Livramento, from which a bus or taxi returns you to Funchal or the cable car. The sled is steered by ropes operated by the runners jogging alongside. The whole enterprise feels like a historical joke until you’re on it, and then it feels like something between a fairground ride and an old Portuguese custom, which is exactly what it is.

Lunch in Monte is straightforward: there are a few restaurants clustered near the cable car station and the church steps, and the one that matters is whichever has a table by the window looking down into the camellia garden below. I had bolo do caco — the local flatbread served warm with garlic butter — and a dish of tuna marinated in vinegar and garlic that was properly sour and tasted like something a sailor would have specifically wanted after six weeks at sea. It is the combination of these two things, bread and acid, that I think of first when Monte comes to mind.

When to go: April and October are the best months — the garden is in full seasonal expression and the crowds are manageable. The cable car from Funchal closes occasionally in strong wind, so check before going and budget for the bus as an alternative. Monte in the rain is actually quite atmospheric — the garden takes on a more intense green and the stone paths become almost luminescent.