Sao Vicente Holidays

You’ll find Sao Vicente crouched between two sides of a valley on the north coast of Madeira. It’s not overrun with tourists yet, and holidays here merge seamlessly into the flow of local life. The landscapes that surround the village are dramatic and carpeted in leek-green foliage and forest, earning a big thumbs up from keen hikers.

Sao Vicente’s worth visiting just to learn about how it was formed. There are a few elegant manor houses dating back to the 1700s, but most of it was largely buried in a massive landslide in 1928. A major patching-up project has rebuilt most of the village in its original style, and today it’s got lots of narrow streets scattered with gift shops and places to eat.

The village is well-known for its volcanic caves. It sits on top of a labyrinth of underground ‘lava tubes’, a result of a volcanic eruption that happened 890 thousand years ago. You can find out all about this, and about how Madeira itself came to be, in the Volcanism Centre. You can also enter the caves from here, and see the tubes first hand, as well as the lava cakes – build ups of lava – that are inside them.