Madeira

The island only has two weathers, and both of them happen at once. You leave Funchal in full sun, drive twenty minutes, and end up inside a cloud with the wipers on — and then you climb out above it.

We were on Pico do Arieiro before eight, above an inversion that stayed flat and unbroken all morning. Most of the walking was on levadas: irrigation channels cut into the cliffs five hundred years ago, now footpaths a metre wide with nothing on the left.

What I did not expect was how much of it is dry. Nine kilometres from laurel rainforest there is a peninsula in the east that looks like it belongs to a different island entirely — brown grass, red rock, no shade at all.