Wednesday 28 May 2014

Postcard from Madeira 3: Going with the flow


On our penultimate day here, we finally got round to doing one of our local levada walks (in all honesty, it was the first properly sunny day in a week - the cloud cover has been a bit persistent). It’s a favourite, because it encompasses the local stretch of the Levada Nova, which takes us deep into the Ribeira da Madalena valley, and carries on to the ridge opposite and returns via the pretty hillside hamlet of Pinheiro and 'our' levada. Rather than give a tedious description, I’ll let the photographs and captions capture something of its flavour:


Where the terrain is too precipitous to contain both levada and footpath,
the path goes on top - here fortunately with some protective handrails.
Casa Rosada is on the ridge in the distance.





A friendly local - he smelled of goat's cheese.


On the final stretch, a much wilder levada
(the one that eventually passes beneath our garden)
wends its way through woodland that is becoming
denuded by the work of a pine-destroying beetle


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