Key takeaways
- One of the highest sea cliffs in Europe, and the visit that follows the wildlife search on this trip.
- From a boat at its foot the scale reads completely differently from the glass skywalk on the top.
- Small cultivated shelves of land at the cliff foot, farmed for generations and reachable only by boat or cable car.
- No development at the waterline and no rivers carrying silt, so the sea below the cliff is exceptionally clear.
Where it sits on the trip
The wildlife comes first. Once the search has run its course and the animals have been watched, the boat turns west along the south coast toward Cabo Girao, which dominates that stretch of shoreline and is impossible to miss from the water.
That ordering makes sense and is worth knowing. Wildlife is time-sensitive and weather-dependent; a cliff is not going anywhere. Doing the uncertain part first and the certain part second is how a three-hour trip guarantees you something to look at even on a quiet day at sea.
What 580 metres looks like from below
Difficult to process, honestly. The number is easy to say and hard to picture, so a comparison helps: Cabo Girao is roughly a hundred and fifty metres taller than the Empire State Building, standing straight out of the water with nothing in front of it.
From a boat at its foot you are at the bottom of that, looking up, and the usual visual cues for judging height are missing. There are no windows to count, no trees at a familiar scale, nothing but rock face going up until it stops. People reach for their cameras and then discover that a photograph of a cliff conveys almost none of it.
The cliff face of Cabo Girao rising from the sea
Above and below
Most visitors to Cabo Girao meet it from the top, at the glass-floored skywalk that cantilevers out over the drop. That is a genuine experience and a very different one: standing on transparent panels looking straight down through your own feet.
The view from the water inverts it entirely. From above you experience the drop as vertigo, a personal sensation. From below you experience the cliff as an object, and the sense is of scale rather than of exposure. Anyone who has done the skywalk should still do this, because they are not the same thing at all.
The fajas at the foot
Look at the base of the cliff and you will see flat ground, green and cultivated, sitting between the rock and the sea. These are fajas: shelves formed by ancient landslides, and among the more remarkable pieces of agricultural stubbornness in Europe.
They have been farmed for generations, growing vines and vegetables in soil that is warm and sheltered by the wall behind it. For most of their history the only way to reach them was by boat, or down a path that does not bear thinking about. A cable car now runs from the top, which has made the work possible for people who are not prepared to risk their lives commuting.
580m
The height of Cabo Girao above the sea, which is roughly a hundred and fifty metres taller than the Empire State Building.
The water below the cliff
Exceptionally clear, and for identifiable reasons. There is no development along the waterline here, no harbour, no outfall, and crucially no river carrying silt into the sea. What you get is deep clean Atlantic water directly against volcanic rock.
Some trips include time in it. One guest describes the crew allowing a fifteen-minute swim, which in water that clear at the foot of that cliff is a memorable place to be. Snorkelling gear is not provided, though, so if you want to look under the surface you need to have brought a mask.
How the cliff got there
Madeira is a volcanic island built up in layers, and those layers are visible in the cliff face as bands of different colour and texture. Each band marks one eruption laying material over the last, ash and basalt alternating, stacked up across hundreds of thousands of years until the island reached this height.
What made the cliff is the Atlantic. Waves have been cutting into the island's southern flank for as long as it has existed, undermining the base and letting the face collapse, then starting again on the fresh rock. A sea cliff is not a thing the island grew; it is the scar left where the ocean has been removing it.
Getting the photograph
Wider than you think. The instinct is to zoom in on the rock face and the result is a picture of a wall, which conveys nothing. What communicates scale is including something known for size in the frame: the boat, another vessel, the fajas at the base, a person on deck.
The light is best when the sun is round to the west, later in the day, when it strikes the south-facing cliff directly rather than leaving it in its own shadow. Middle of the day flattens it. And if you are travelling on a trip that also happens to be running toward sunset, this stretch of coast is where you would want to be.
One further thing worth doing before you raise a camera at all: look at it properly for a minute first. This is a piece of landscape that people photograph reflexively and then find disappointing on the phone afterwards, because the image cannot carry the sense of standing underneath it. Whatever you take home will be a record rather than a reproduction. Give the actual experience of craning your neck at half a kilometre of rock the attention it deserves, and treat the photograph as the souvenir it is going to be regardless.
