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This is a typical example of a destination lecture, It would last around 35 minutes and allow time at the end for a question and answer session. The lecture would be illustrated with an animated PowerPoint based slide and video clip show. The presenter will from time to time break away from the basic script to add updates and the latest tourist and/or company information.

In some cases, Disney Cruise Line for example, the Day at Sea Lecture would also be given added value with a live commetary from the Bridge as the ship approaches the Port of Call. For on-board convention delegates this type of insider information helps create a lasting memory of the event and for wives and girlfriends, adds a little sparkle to the overall experience.

This can easily be adapted for shore based venues, in every case the delegate actually gets a little more in terms of value and information.

After the presentations, it is usual for the lecturer to make him/herself available for individual questions, often adjouring the meeting to a lounge or bar, to free up the theatre. Often those questions are of a type that would not be put directly to a company colleague but the independent and impartial guest speaker or presenter, is often an invaluable conduit into management thinking and also neatly providing a snapshop of thinking "from the shopfloor". 

 

HAVE SOME MADIERA  DESTINATION LECTURE OUTLINE

(C) JULIAN BRAY 2009

   All lectures are updated and revised before delivery and form part of a wider PowerPoint presentation containing further information and comment. The abstract on here is for entertainment purposes and should not be relied upon as a statement of fact or promotion of items mentioned therein.

Have Some Madeira         FINAL

© JULIAN BRAY 2006

UPDATED TO 05/06/2008

Madeira’s Features

1.   Some people say Madeira has never really shaken off the image of being an island retreat for those in delicate health; a place where the bankrupt old nobility of Europe could safely flee to escape their debts, or a well appointed retirement home for impoverished former colonial servants.

2.   Younger people might even turn up their noses at the thought of a destination with no beaches, and no nightlife: Madeira is definitely not a clubbers paradise.

3.   This all sounds very negative but it is, however, one of Europe’s most intriguing and breathtakingly beautiful destinations. The island, a mountainous volcanic landscape carved into scores of deep valleys and ravines, clothed in the luxuriant vegetation that thrives in the frost-free climate.

4.   Hundreds of miles of footpaths run alongside the ingenious network of irrigation canals (called levadas, bringing water from the wet side of the island to the sunny but drier south. Something we might like to try in the UK. Easy to follow, these paths lead you deep into the quiet rural heart of the island, where the agriculture and way of life has little changed over the years and  has yet to catch up with the industrial revolution.

5.   Flowers are Madeira’s other main attraction; a whole week can easily be filled visiting it’s parks and gardens. Colourful species introduced from South Africa, South America and Asia flourish in every rural front garden and on every urban balcony.

6.   Practically every roadside on the island has been colonised by agapanthus, poinsettias, agaves and bird-of-paradise plants, the markets are full of colourful orchids and many varieties of cut fowers,

7.   The walks, the landscapes and the beautiful verdant countryside, combined with the ever-friendly people and appetising food, makes Madeira a place of immense appeal and a lot can be shoehorned into the all too short a time we have at this port of call.

8.   The Islands Geography
• Set in the eastern Atlantic, the island of Madeira is around 1,000 km from Lisbon and 600 km from Morocco, the nearest mainland.
• Madeira measures 64 km by 23 km that is  1,741 sq km with a  population of 300,000.
• Madeira’s nearest neighbour is the island of Porto Santo (population 5,000), which lies 37 km to the northeast. •

9.   The Landscape
• Madeira s the product of volcano eruptions that took place some 20 million years ago. Volcanic peaks are a major feature, several of them rising to more than 1,800m.

10.                     Christopher Columbus described Madeira to Queen Isabella of Spain by crumpling up a piece of paper: apart from the southern coastal plain, the mountainous island is carved into myriad deep valleys and ravines.
• Driving distances are greatly magnified by the steep terrain, necessitating slow progress along the tortuous zigzagging roads.

11.                     We now turn to the Climate
• Madeira’s climate is sub-tropical: the southerly altitude ensures warm, frost-free winters and cooling Atlantic winds take the edge off the intense heat of summer.
• Atlantic fronts drop rain or the north side of the island, whereas the south side remains dry and sunny for much of the year.

12.                     An island of stark contrasts, vibrant haunting images and lifestyles. Just imagine an elderly woman carrying a pile of bracken on her head. The foliage hides everything but her legs as she steps uphill with the nimbleness of a mountain goat.

13.                     Two walkers balance along a narrow path, halfway up a cliff-face — two .
bright dots in a vast volcanic landscape. A farmer parks his battered van and uncovers the baskets of fruit he has for sale: papayas, avocados, peaches and strawberries, plus a bucket or two of pink lilies.

14.                     Just a mile or two away, a gentleman of the old school slides a decanter across a polished mahogany table. The wine has an aroma of toasted chestnuts. Languidly a sunbather turns over, and orders another cocktail from the beachside bar. ‘Madeira,’ as one 19th-century traveller put it, ‘ensures almost every European comfort with every tropical luxury.’

15.                     Portugal has owned Madeira for five centuries, and the British have been residents here for some three centuries. Between them they have created a heritage of beautiful gardens, wines fit for the gods, churches filled with fine carving and rare tiles, and museums scattered with Flemish Old Masters and priceless objets d’art.

16.                     The island itself, this ‘semi-tropical speck in the Atlantic, some 700km off the west coast of Africa, does the rest. The mild climate and gentle pace may lull you into a dreamy indolence — but if you can rouse yourself for a walk along the water channels that criss-cross the island you will be rewarded by quite another Madeira. What we see of Madeira are simply the highest points of a massive underwater mountain range, towering well over 5,ooom above the sea bed.

17.                     Violent submarine volcanic eruptions pushed the island up through the surface of the Atlantic, around 20 million years ago - the Azores and Canary Islands made their appearance at about the same time-.

18.                     A jagged chain of mountains runs like a backbone through Madeira for some 48km, flattening out at the western end into a high plateau, the Paul da Serra, several kilo- metres across and 1,000m above sea-level. Long ridges (Iombci) separated by deep valleys run on all sides of this central spine.

19.                     Cabo Girão to the west of Funchal, is the second highest sea cliff in the world, with a plunge of 589m to the breakers.

20.                     The highest peak on Porto Santo is Pico do Facho (517m) in the northeast corner, but most of the island is low and flat. Most of the population of 253,045 live on the south side of Madeira, about 90,000 of them in Funchal. Under 5,000 people live permanently on Porto Santo.

The volcanic rock was gouged into an island of high mountains and cliffs. Strong rivers flowing off the mountain tops carved out ravine-like valleys.  Most of Madeira is made up of soft, reddish-brown tufa, with occasional pillars of dark basalt.

21.                     Tufa, as one traveller pointed out, can be cut as smoothly and precisely as cheese. You’ll see roads sliced out of vertical cliff-faces, mountains carved into tiny terraces, and goat-sheds scooped out of the hillsides.

22.                     The rock-faces visible on land continue to plummet steeply underwater - to the delight of boys who dive off high cliffs into the sea, and fishermen, who manage a deep-sea haul just a short journey from port.

23.                     Unfortunately for us, Madeira seems to reserve its hardest rocks for the shores.
There is not a single white sandy beach to be seen on the main island; instead, you’ll
find yourself swimming off concrete jetties, and gingerly stretching out to dry with the geckos on a lumpy terrain.

24.                     The neighbouring island of Porto Santo makes up for the omission: almost the entire southern coast is one long, uninterrupted, picture - postcard golden strand. One theory is that all the sand off Madeira’s beaches was blown here during an enormous volcanic explosion.

25.                     From time to time the Funchal city councillors darkly plot to fetch some of it back to make a beach of their own.

26.                     A little taste of history…keen to strengthen ties with England, as France and Spain were showing disturbing signs of making peace with each other. Dona Luisa offered her daughter Catherine of Bragança as a wife to the newly restored King Charles II.

27.                     Louis 16^th of France had already turned her down, and so Dona Luisa upped the stakes a bit. Catherine came with double the usual royal dowry: solid weights in silver and gold, a concession for trade with Brazil, two million cruzodos, Bombay, Tangier and — it is said —the island of Madeira.

28.                     But the scribe who was writing all this down was, reputedly, a Madeirense who couldn’t bring himself to include his home island on the list. He persuaded Dona Luisa to keep Madeira back as an ultimate lure, should King Charles fail to bite.

29.                     Catherine travelled to England with a secret document which added Madeira to her dowry, but she didn’t need it. The Merry Monarch jumped at the opportunity of a source of funds for his lavish lifestyle.

30.                     In return he agreed to defend Portugal ‘as if it were England itself’.
Madeiran trade went from strength to strength. Portuguese ships were by royal proclamation ordered to call in on the island and take on wine for the colonists in Brazil, thus laying the foundations for the modern Madeiran wine trade.

31.                     Eventually the island became the chief stopover for all ships wanting to stock up on supplies before beginning the long haul across the Atlantic. When King Charles issued his ordinance forbidding exports to ‘English Plantations overseas’, save for goods leaving English ports in ‘English bottoms’, he carefully excluded Madeira from the ban .

32.                     This gave local wine merchants a monopoly over trade with America and the West Indies. Madeiran wine became one of the most popular drinks in the New World, and a strong community of British merchants grew up on Madeira.

33.                     They cornered the wine market, expanded into sugar and other trades and were soon leading players in the island’s economy.
The British From the end of the 17th century onwards, the British played such an integral role in island affairs that many of them seemed to regard Madeira as a colony rather than foreign territory.

34.                     Though the authorities were often concerned that the British owned too much property on the island, and had their fingers in too many local pies, the relationship between the two communities has, on the whole, been cordial.

35.                     Feelings only became a little strained when British troops were garrisoned on the island, and when an over-zealous pastor tried to convert local catholic Portuguese and there was very nearly a nasty moment when Captain Cook visited the island in 1768.

36.                      The famous explorer, then on his first voyage in the Endeavour, ’battered the fort...by way of resenting an affront that had been offered to the British flag’. Exactly what the nature of the insult is we do not know, as the account was suppressed from official records.

37.                     Later, though, Cook made up for his petulance by going ashore and planting a TulipTree. Dr Hawksworth,the chronicler of the voyage, notes that the British consul received them ‘with the kindness of a brother and the liberality of a prince’. (The tree, survived until 1963, when it blew down in a storm.)

38.                     Napoleon and the British Occupations
British forces twice occupied Madeira during the Napoleonic Wars —from July 1801 to January 1802, and again from December 1807 to October 1814.

39.                     They were friendly occupations, aimed at protecting the islands from the French, but the first one caused a diplomatic rumpus as someone had forgot to tip off the Portuguese governor that he was about to be superseded.

40.                     The second occupation was commanded by General William Carr Beresford, who was already quite a hero after campaigns in Egypt, South Africa and the Argentine. Napoleon had tried to persuade the Portuguese to co-operate with the naval blockade of Britain. Portugal refused, and in 1807 French troops marched on Lisbon. The British whisked the Portuguese royal family away to safety in Brazil. Generals Beresford and Wellesley stayed on to deal with the French.

41.                     On Christmas Eve, Beresford arrived in Funchal Bay with a fleet of 24 ships, but soon realized that the island wasn’t in need of quite so much protection.

42.                     He left with half his garrison in 1808, though the rest of the troops stayed on until peace was finally made with France - and contributed noticeably to the island’s gene pool even today you will see the odd blonde or ginger mophead bobbing along in an otherwise dark haired school crocodile of pupils.

43.                     Napoleon himself called in on Madeira in 1815, on his way to exile in St Helena. He found an unexpected admirer in the then British consul, Henry Veitch. Veitch sold Boney some pipes of excellent wine (the famous Napoleon Madeira) and got into hot water by addressing the ex Emperor as ‘Your Majesty’).

44.                     He kept the gold louis he received in payment, and buried them behind the foundation stone of the new English Church.

45.                     The British Factory
During the course of the 18th century British merchants came to control the wine trade almost entirely. When the dreaded disease called the noble rot phylloxera struck in the second half of the 19th century, destroying nearly all the vines many merchants moved over to sugar-refining — and soon the British controlled that too.

46.                     Some time during the 18th century (no one is sure when, because all records were destroyed in a massive flood in 1806),the merchants established the British Factory.

47.                     This was the equivalent of a Chamber of Commerce made up of the senior partners of the island’s leading British firms, and along the lines that the Portuguese had set up in the 15th and 16th centuries to guard and administer their trading posts abroad.

48.                     For decades, the Factory held sway over the Madeiran British, acting almost like a small colonial government.The factory levied a tax on wine exports and built and financed a church, hospital and cemetery They were a force not to be crossed (as young upstart traders soon learned), and adjudicated in (though sometimes propelled) the feuds that local families waged against one another.

49.                     The Factors also acted as an agent for British merchants, enabling them to buy collectively, so had enormous economic clout on the island. It was finally wound during a depression in the wine trade.

50.                     The remaining factors started the English Rooms, an exclusive club on the seafront in Funchal. Later, as membership thinned out, they had to lower their standards and accept partners from less powerful firms — and even managers — into the fold, and eventually the club closed down altogether.

51.                     Miguelites and Liberals
Even after the defeat of the French in 1814, the Portuguese king remained in Brazil with his family and Beresford stayed on in Lisbon as marshal of the Portuguese army.

52.                     But the army staged a coup, set up a Cortes (parliament) elected by universal male suffrage, and devised a new constitution. Dom Joo returned from Brazil in 1821, content to accept the restricted powers that this constitution imposed — but his younger son, Dom Miguel, had other ideas. 

53.                     When Dom Joo died in 1826, his elder son and heir Dom Pedro IV was still living in Brazil, having been made emperor of what was by then a recently independent territory. Dom Miguel grabbed the opportunity to declare himself absolute monarch of Portugal and began a crackdown on supporters of the new constitution he had always disapproved of.

54.                     Dom Pedro returned to Portugal and bloody battles ensued, in which the British actively took the side of Dom Pedro and the Liberals.

55.                     In 1828 a new Miguelite governor was sent to Madeira together with 1,000 troops. A small British force had landed a few days before to help the Madeirense, but all resistance was quashed.

56.                     Over 150 people were arrested, though many leading liberal figures were able to escape to Britain on the frigate Alligator. Dom Miguel was eventually beaten in 1834, and exiled to Austria. The monarchy weathered badly the political turbulence and economic recession that followed the rebellion. Finally, in 1910 Dom Manuel  fled to Britain and Portugal was proclaimed a republic.

57.                     Moving on: The Twentieth Century
On 23 July 1905, the Paris edition of the New York Herald carried a report headed:
‘German Company Plans to Make Madeira an Up-to-Date Resort’. Snappy headline for the time perhaps, but there is a sinister twist to this tale.

58.                     In return for a promise to build a sanatorium and  several hospitals and further promises to treat 40 TB patients a year free, the Madeira Actien Gesellschaft,— by arrangement with the Portuguese government —was empowered to take over all business concerns on the island. The British were furious.

59.                     When plans for some of the hospitals were exposed as really being designs for a series of hotels and holiday camps, the Portuguese realized that they were being colonized by the Germans through the back door and promptly withdrew the concession.

60.                     In 1914, all German property on Madeira was confiscated. Germany declared war on Portugal in 1916 after German ships had been impounded in Lisbon harbour.

61.                     Madeira got off fairly lightly during the war although Funchal was twice shelled by German U-boats, in 1916 and 1917.

62.                     The decline in trade during the First World War, the Prohibition in America and the disappearance of the madeira-drinking classes after the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia knocked a large hole in the Madeiran economy.

63.                     On the mainland, times were not much better. The new Portuguese republic began to flounder—there were no less than 45
different governments between 1910 and 1926.

64.                     Shortly after a military coup in 1926, Dr Salazar became minister of finance. By 1932 he was prime minister and he remained a virtual dictator until leaving office after a stroke in 1968 - although he rebuilt the economy, his regime became increasingly cruel and repressive.

65.                     In 1974, after a bloodless coup, his successor Dr Marcello Caetano was overthrown and so the basis of the modern state of Portugal was finally established.

66.                     In 1931 a dispensation which became known as the Hunger Law gave a monopoly to a small group of local bakers or millers. This not only caused a rise in the price of bread, but had a domino effect on investors and companies throughout the Madeiran economy, which led eventually to the collapse of the island’s two main banks.

67.                     Thousands lost their savings.
the mills were attacked and a general strike broke out. Lisbon sent troops, but soldiers defected, joining the local garrison and a group of 300 political prisoners (who had been deported from the mainland a few months previously) staged a coup.

68.                     General Sousa Dias, one of the deportees, was declared dictator. Many British residents fled aboard the passing Edinburgh Castle and left the island. Others holed up in the luxury hotels around Reid’s, protected by a small group of fusiliers and soldiers that had hurried over from Gibraltar.

69.                     A punitive force arrived from Lisbon at the end of April, and the rebels were soon defeated. Some of the ringleaders sought asylum with the British, but most of those who had been involved in the fighting, including Dias himself, were imprisoned and taken back to Portugal.

70.                     From that point on, Madeira kept her grumbles to herself, Portugal remained neutral during the Second World War—though once again the decline in trade and tourism was bad for the island economy.

71.                     The 1974 Revolution was greeted with rejoicing, even though it too meant a
blow to tourism. Local supporters of Salazar made a quick break for Brazil, new political parties sprang up.

72.                     But within a year civil war loomed. On Madeira, the mainland, was concern about growing communist influences. On the mainland a counter-coup was defeated in 1975, and in 1976 a new constitution was adopted.

73.                     Under this constitution Madeira was given special status within Portugal as an  Autonomous Political Region.
This gave a massive boost to the tourist industry and established a Free Trade Zone.

74.                     So from what some may initially say is not a clubbers paradise, you only have to scratch the surface of this exotic location to uncover a whole wealth of treasures.   All in all, this is an island of mystery and intrigue, it has many attractions to suit all tastes and some beautiful scenic walks – simply follow the levadas , the water canals to discover the real country.

75.                     Ladies and Gentlemen I’ll be happy to take a few questions ….

 

    All lectures are updated and revised before delivery and form part of a wider PowerPoint presentation containing further information and comment. The abstract on here is for entertainment purposes and should not be relied upon as a statement of fact or promotion of items mentioned therein.