Porto Santo

We took the ferry from Funchal on a whim, mostly because Lia had read something about sand that’s supposed to be good for your joints, and she wasn’t going to let that go unverified. Two and a half hours later the boat pulled into a completely different world — Madeira’s cliffs and clouds gave way to something dry, flat, almost lunar. It’s strange how a place discovered a year before its famous neighbor, in 1418, by the same Portuguese sailors, ended up so different in character. Zarco and Vaz Teixeira must have felt something similar stepping off their own boat, minus the sunscreen and the ferry snack bar.

The beach is the whole point, and I say that as someone who usually gets bored of beaches by day two. Nine kilometers of pale gold sand running almost the entire length of the island’s south coast — we walked a good chunk of it one morning before the heat got serious, stopping to let the sand run through our fingers because yes, it really is finer than anything we’d touched on Madeira’s black volcanic shores. Lia buried her feet up to the ankle and declared it “doing something,” which is as scientific as she gets on vacation.

In Vila Baleira we found the house where Christopher Columbus supposedly lived in the 1480s, after marrying the governor’s daughter Filipa Moniz Perestrelo — a small, unassuming museum now, cool and dim inside, with maps and models that made the whole thing feel less like a legend and more like a guy who just happened to marry well and end up on a quiet island for a while. I liked imagining him staring out at the same dry hills we were sweating under, maybe already dreaming of bigger water.

What stuck with me most, though, was the quiet. No lush forest, no waterfalls, none of Madeira’s drama — just low rainfall, scrubby hills, and a stillness that felt earned after the crossing. We ate grilled limpets at a beachfront place with paper napkins weighted down by stones against the wind, and didn’t talk much. Some islands ask you to explore. Porto Santo just asks you to sit down.

When to go: We went in July, and I’d steer you toward June through September if dry, warm beach days are what you’re after — the rest of the year the island can feel a little too stripped bare for its own good.