History of Funchal Madeira island

Winston Churchill on vacation in Madeira and painted their landscapes. Empress Sissi, as it became known in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century, never forget the moments spent in the Island, where he was photographed for the first time.

The city of Funchal on Madeira, was the first to be founded on broad areas of Discovery. The archipelago was discovered in 1419 and their settlements arose in the context of the discoveries of the fifteenth century as the first experience of settlement and exploitation of lands hitherto never inhabited. Tested cultures that have significant revenue immediately, as of early wheat, then the sugar cane, this model came to be exported to the new lands Atlantic, like the Canary Islands, Azores and Cape Verde, and later to Brazil.

In the late fifteenth century, based on the exploitation of sugar,Madeira was established as an international business center, passing through there a wave of international outsiders, between brokers, traders and adventurers, from different European origins. Based on German capital, Italian and Flemish merchants, under the oversight of the Portuguese crown, the production and distribution of sugar from Madeira was one of the bases for the formation of international mercantile capitalism of the modern era.

Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the island of Madeira, through its port of Funchal, managed to ensure theircommercial and strategic position within the North Atlantic, then through a new product: the Madeira wine. The vineyard was introduced with the first settlers and already in 1455, the Venetian navigator Louis de Cadamosto, visiting Madeira, referred to the excellence of the Madeira grapes and export their wines.

William Shakespeare mentioned the wines of the island in some of its parts. His fame was so important, especially malvasia, which the playwright describes the Duke of Clarence, brother of King Edward IV, to choose, like death, being drowned in a vat of wine.

The island then becomes an important summer resort, there by passing some of the most important crowned heads, like the empress of Brazil, the Archduchess Leopoldina of Austria in 1817 and Amelia in Leuchetemberg in 1852.

However, perhaps the most striking figure was the Empress Elisabeth of Austria, who are gathered there long months between 1860 and 1861. The Empress Sissi, as it became known in the romantic literature of the nineteenth century, never forget the moments spent in the Island, where he was first photographed, referring to the ever so warm and having managed to return to Madeira in 1893-94, few years before his death in 1898.

The island of Madeira was also a special retreat for Winston Churchill. Opened in 1891, Reid `s Palace Hotel was the favorite haunt of Churchill in 1950.