Machico

Machico is a town and municipality on the eastern coast of the island of Madeira, recognised as the first settlement founded in the archipelago. It was here that, around 1419–1420, the captains João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira are said to have landed as they began the settlement of the island, making Machico the cradle of the Portuguese presence on Madeira. The town, raised to city status in 1996, rises around a sheltered bay where the Machico stream reaches the sea, in a fertile valley facing the Atlantic.

Origins and the first captaincy

When Madeira was divided administratively, Machico was given the seat of the first of the three captaincies of the archipelago, entrusted to Tristão Vaz Teixeira as captain of the lord-proprietor. Its territory extended over the entire eastern half of the island, while the captaincy of Funchal, given to Zarco, held the western half, and that of Porto Santo held the neighbouring island. This division shaped the organisation of Madeiran space throughout the whole period of fifteenth-century colonisation.

The place name gave rise to one of the most enduring legends of island history: that of the English navigator Robert Machim, supposedly shipwrecked in the bay in the fourteenth century with his beloved Anne of Arfet. The narrative, widely circulated between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, lacks documentary basis and is today understood as a literary construction, yet it remains bound up with the identity of the city.

Religious heritage and the Chapel of Miracles

The most venerated monument in Machico is the Chapel of Miracles, built on the site where tradition places the celebration of the first Mass on the island, on the day after the landing. The flash flood of 1803 almost entirely destroyed the building and swept the crucifix out to sea — recovered, according to popular devotion, off the coast. From that episode the chapel came to invoke the Lord of Miracles, whose feast, on 8 and 9 October, is one of the greatest pilgrimages on Madeira. The present building is the result of the reconstruction completed and inaugurated in 1883.

A few steps away stands the Mother Church of Nossa Senhora da Conceição, of fifteenth-century foundation, which preserves portals and stone elements in the Gothic and Manueline tradition, testimony to the antiquity of the urban nucleus.

Coastal forts and the defence of the bay

The bay’s exposure to corsair attacks led to the construction of a crossed defensive system, part of the network of coastal forts that protected Madeira’s coastal settlements. The Fort of São João Baptista, also called the Fort of the Landing Place in memory of the first landing, stands beside the quay, at the north-eastern entrance to the inlet, and keeps a small chapel within. Facing it, the Fort of Nossa Senhora do Amparo, of triangular plan designed to command two angles of the bay, is set on the opposite side and today houses the city’s tourist office.

Surrounded by the slopes rising to the Laurel Forest of Madeira, Machico combines its role as the founding landmark of settlement with a heritage ensemble — religious, military and urban — that documents six centuries of Madeiran history.