I’m lying on the seventeenth floor of Madeira’s boujiest new hotel, Savoy Palace, as a pool butler brings me my second mojito of the afternoon. A group of twenty-something Brits set up their Macbooks on a day bed next to me and the vibe reminds me of a recent trip to Lisbon — except on the mainland we didn’t spend the morning abseiling down waterfalls or driving through cloud forests.
Here on this tiny Portugese island, adrenaline is essentially a side dish with breakfast. “We call it a Madeiran massage,” our local jeep driver Pedro tells us of the steep, bumpy so-called “banana roads” that criss-cross the island between banana plantations. “If you’re afraid of heights, Madeira is the best place to fight your fears.”
