Madeira Flower Festival

Funchal has been many times compared to a flower in the sea, making Madeira Flower Festival just natural. This has some sense because just as the flowers begin to blossom, so does Funchal. The city celebrates the return of the sun and color with a party that makes your eyes go round and your nose doing some overtime. The Flower Party serves as a showcase to all the beautiful plants and flowers that bless the city of Funchal, and many flowers there are indeed.

Through out almost a week you will open your eyes and enter the most perfumed city in the world, the best smelling streets you’ll ever visit. The streets are filled with music and street performers that cheer up everyone’s day, be it clowns fooling around or folklore groups dancing and inviting everyone to join them.

Through every pedestrian street there are hundreds of feet of flower beds, arranged in beautiful ways. The organization of the Madeira Flower Festival has come up with the idea to make this a competition between every parish of the island, this way every year the flower beds grow in complexity, number and types of flowers. It’s a healthy competition, being no official winner, there are only opinions but no one ever gets the blue ribbon from the organization.

The children play a huge roll in the Flower Party. Every schoolchild prepare a themed outfit in their school, according to their class and then parade all around the city giving flowers to everyone who comes to see them. The parade then finishes in a square that is adorned with a large green wall. This particular wall is called the wall of hope, where the children pin their wishes and hopes that they believe it can improve the world.

The next day is the real parade, with any children that want to participate but also the adults. Just like a carnival, there are floaters with different flower arrangements and different themes with their own music and dance routines. Every body that participates in the Flower Party are doing it so willingly that they even have to pay for their own outfits, but do so proudly because the Madeira Flower Festival is definetly a Funchal Party, a part of tradition and culture.