Madeira Wicker Basket Toboggans

Monte Church   

After visiting the Botanical Garden and taking our third cable car ride of the day, we were still high up in the village of Monte looking down on Funchal. A short walk from the cable car station brought us to the Monte Church which dominates the skyline here. Built in honour of the patron saint of Funchal, the church is the most important place of pilgrimage on the island and also houses the tomb of Charles I of Austria who lived nearby after his exile from Austria in 1921.

Monte   

There are palaces and more tropical gardens around Monte but having explored the main Botanical Garden we just wanted to sit down and have a beer and lunch. Monte village proved to be an excellent venue for that and we sat sheltered from the sun in the shade of the tall trees. We discovered that huge forest fires in 2013 had destroyed much of the vegetation and gardens in this part of Madeira but most Monte, right on the edge of the fires, escaped.

Wicker basket toboggans setting off from Monte   

After lunch, we walked back to Monte Church and the top of the wicker basket toboggan run. Created in the 19^th century, these wicker basket toboggans provide the transport for the wealthy businessmen of Monte to commute all the way down the steep hill from their homes to the commercial area of Funchal.

Today the tourist version just covers the top 2 kilometres of their commute. Yes it’s touristy, yes it’s expensive, and yes we still had return tickets for the cable car but, you can’t come to Madeira without taking a wicker basket toboggan ride!

Our turn came and we set off down the hill at speed, slewing sideways as the ‘drivers’ negotiated the bends in the road. Each toboggan is controlled by 2 men called “carreiros” who use their boots (these days soled with worn car tyres) as brakes.

Crossroads ahead! Who has priority?   

The 2 km run is on a normal road and so on the slower bits we were overtaken by cars. Fast approaching a crossroads, with a truck crossing ahead of us, we did wonder who actually has priority in the Portuguese highway code. Fortunately, a chap stopped the crossing traffic for us and so we could toboggan on down the hill without any loss of momentum.

CNN once described the wicker basket toboggan run as, “one of the coolest commutes to work in the world” and it certainly brought big grins all round.

A little further down the slope we discovered that we had picked the GTI version of the wicker toboggans because we caught up with the 2 toboggans ahead of us. Our “carreiros” slowed us down and then dragged us along to where the slope steepened again.

Livramento; the end of the toboggan run    

After a brief pause to give us some space from the toboggans ahead, our GTI toboggan was off again on the steepest stretch of the ride. It was great fun and well worth doing but, predictably, all too soon came to an end. Our “carreiros” used their car tyre shod boots to slow us down and then steer us into the small yard at Livramento that was the terminus. Ahead of us the steep road continued another 2½ kilometres down to the old commercial centre of the city.

Back in the old part of Funchal   

We clambered out of our toboggan and decided that, having taken the lazy way down the first half of the hill, we should stretch our legs and walk the rest of the route back down to sea level. A zig-zag route took us though some of the backstreets of the city that we hadn’t seen and then somewhat footsore, we returned to BV for the rest of the evening.

Funchal, Madeira, Portugal