Cabo Girão

Cabo Girão is a sheer sea cliff on the south coast of Madeira, one of the highest in Europe, dropping around 580 metres from the headland to the Atlantic. Like the rest of the island it is volcanic, built up in the Miocene. The name is usually explained as the "cape of the turn": tradition holds that João Gonçalves Zarco, exploring the coast in the early fifteenth century, turned back here and anchored in the bay that became Câmara de Lobos.

The view from the top is vertiginous in the literal sense. Since October 2012 a glass-floored skywalk has projected over the edge, so that visitors stand directly above the drop and look down past their feet to the surf. Along the coast the eye runs east towards Câmara de Lobos and Funchal and west along the high green south shore. Just behind the viewpoint stands the chapel of Nossa Senhora de Fátima, built in 1974 on the site of an earlier chapel of 1931.

At the foot of the cliff lie the fajãs, narrow platforms of low-lying land between the cliff and the sea, which Madeirans cultivated. For generations they could be reached only by boat or by precarious paths; in 2003 a cable car was installed to serve the farmers, and it now carries visitors down too, to a strip of cultivated land squeezed between the cliff and the sea. Seen from above, the tiny green terraces at the bottom give the best sense of how enormous the wall is.

Getting there

Cabo Girão lies about 2.5 km west of Câmara de Lobos and roughly 22 km by air from Madeira's Cristiano Ronaldo International Airport (FNC). Funchal, the island capital, is a short drive east. The viewpoint and skywalk are on the headland road above the cliff; a separate cable car descends to the fajãs at the foot of the cliff.