Madeira

Madeira Natural Park was created in 1982 and protects some 560 km², around two thirds of the island's area, in the eastern Atlantic. Its most valuable element, the laurisilva, was inscribed by UNESCO on the World Heritage List in 1999.

The laurisilva is an evergreen subtropical forest of lauroid leaves that covered much of southern Europe and the Mediterranean during the Tertiary and vanished with the cooling of the Quaternary. It survived only in Macaronesia, where the oceanic climate remained stable, and Madeira's is the most extensive and best-preserved stand in the world: it covers some 150 km², around 20 % of the island, and roughly 90 % of the forest is primary.

Its workings depend on fog: the leaves intercept the moisture of the clouds that rest against the northern slopes and condense it, generating a water input far greater than that of rainfall and feeding the springs on which the whole island depends. The levadas, irrigation channels cut since the fifteenth century, distribute that water and today also serve as a network of footpaths. The forest is home to endemic species such as the til, the vinhático and the barbusano, and to a fauna including the Trocaz pigeon, the endemic lizard and seabirds that breed on the cliffs, among them the threatened Madeiran shearwater.