Funchal Port has come to greater improvements over the last years. The much newer funchal airport has stole some of the air out of funchal port development but the airplane fad has been pushed over by the comfort and style that arriving in a cruise possesses. In recent years there has been a very large increase in cruise passengers, this is due to the lower prices that allow any normal person to purchase a trip cruising the oceans and arriving to it’s destinations in high class and style.
Funchal, being one of the most popular islands of Europe, attracts a large amount of tourists and a considerable fraction of those come to the city in these grand atlantic cruises. The Madeira’s government has been quite attentive to this situation and has considerably improved along the years both the capacity and the quality of Funchal port.
Funchal Port
The port is located just a fifteen minute walk from the center of the city, and that’s just the length of the harbor itself. As soon as you leave the harbor, boom, Funchal’s dead center.
For many decades, Funchal has been an ideal stop for all the cruise ships due to it’s location in the Atlantic, making it a reference to all the ships that are traveling to South America or the african coast. Right until the second world war, the Funchal port was the place to stop in the cruise ship world. Unfortunatly the war did ruin that for Madeira, and a few other things of course.
Occasionally it also serves as a tourist point that is solely for the purpose of showing the island to the passengers because the archipelago of the Azores presents a more valid point for refueling and restocking it’s food storage mainly for it’s location, the Azores are the only populated group of islands in hundreds of miles of water.
The reason that cruise ships and Funchal are so good for each other is the symbiosis that exists between the town and funchal port. There isn’t any space between them. Literally, as soon as you go up the ramp, turn left and you have a shopping center, right there. One of the city’s most important streets, the Avenida do Mar ( The Sea’s Avenue) has gained much of it’s importance because it’s the street that comes out of the harbor and it’s the street that leads all of the inhabitants to the city’s sea exit.
The Funchal port has been in recent years deviated from all of the industrial ships that come in. Those ships are being planned to deliver all of their supplies to a neighboring port in the city of Canical. This makes the Funchal harbor exclusively for tourists. You can still buy fresh fish in Funchal but you don’t have to smell it. This way it has maximized all that it can offer to the tourists, helping with transportation, hospitality and accommodation. Although funchal port isn’t particularly small, during the high season of the cruises, the summer and the new year, many ships have to stay out of the perimeter so no space can be wasted with some product boat that doesn’t really need to be there.
