Oscar Niemeyer in Madeira.

We stayed at the Casino Park Hotel, of interest to us because it was designed by Oscar Niemeyer, the Brazilian architect of many of the public buildings in the new city of Brasilia. 

The present owners are the Pestana family, who are obviously very proud of the history of this building as they commissioned a smart coffee table book detailing its conception and construction. A copy was placed in our room but unfortunately the English 'translation' was largely unintelligible. The hotel maintains all the original design features in its interior furnishings.

Neimeyer was a pioneer in the use of reinforced concrete used solely for aesthetic impact. He designed the hotel and casino whilst living in Paris in the '60's and 70's as an exile from the regime in Brazil. His buildings are often characterised by being spacious and exposed, mixing volumes and empty spaces to create unconventional patterns.

"From a line architecture is born. When it is beautiful and creates surprise it can attain, being well driven, a superior level of a work of art."

"It is not the right angle that attracts me, nor the straight line, hard and inflexible, created by man. What attracts me is the free and sensual curve - the curve that I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuous course of its rivers, in the body of the beloved woman."

Cantilevered balconies provide sitting places for gazing out to sea.

 

This period of building is very unfashionable now, with elements that remind me of a municipal car park. Nevertheless it is interesting to see these buildings so cherished and functioning well.

A curving walkway links the hotel to the casino building.

The circular casino seen from the grounds of the hotel.

Niemeyer also quotes Le Corbusier who said, "Outline, in architecture, is the original stroke, the basic idea, the architectural invention."

and Zevi, "architecture is like a huge hollow sculpture inside which the man enters , walks and lives."
In these buildings he uses the spiral shape for the first time, a shape that he would use again in later projects.



The dining room looks out across the pool to the harbour where most evenings one or two cruise ships dock, sailing out the following evening. The entrance to the dining room is via a wide, curving ramp that creates a very grand entrance!

Last night's dessert plate necessitates an early morning swim!

The great advantage of an unheated pool is that you can have it all to yourself.

Once you are in it is great - it's just the getting in that is hard work!

(There was also a well heated indoor pool, a sauna, jacuzzi and hammam where Himself melted daily.)

Reid's Hotel, Funchal.

Every day from our hotel we could look back a little way along the coast and see the famous Reid's Palace Hotel, created by a Scot, William Reid. He was born in Kilmarnock, one of twelve children. He was not a healthy boy and at fourteen years of age his father, a farmer, gave him five pounds and told him to seek a more congenial climate. William arrived in Madeira as a cabin boy in 1836.

The island was becoming a place for the wealthy to stay for periods from three months to several years. At first William and his wife earned their living in letting out local quintas to the rich visitors. Later in life he bought a rocky outcrop of land on which to build his hotel but died before the project was completed in 1891. His son, also called William, took over the business and the hotel became a venue for the rich and famous. Flying boats would bring the visitors to the island.  

In 1936 the hotel was bought by the Blandy family, famous for Madeira wine, and now it is owned by the Orient Express Group. The hotel lobby is decorated with wonderful period posters from the glamorous 20's and 30's.

THE thing to do in Madeira is have tea on the terrace at Reid's. The hotel is very British in period style, and as you can see, on the day that we visited, so was the weather!

We were disinclined to sit and watch the grey clouds swirl, far better to stroll about the hotel's interior, to look at the photograph's of previous visitors, Winston Churchill, George Bernard Shaw, and to gawp in admiration at the beautiful floor and the mural painted on a wall of silver leaf in the bar. 

 

Soft, pale carpets, bowls of flowers, comfortable sofas and chairs.

I shall only return to Madeira if I am allowed to stay at Reid's Hotel!

Rural Madeira.

Madeira was once a volcanic island. It rises precipitously out of the sea, an inhospitable landscape of deep ravines and high mountains, the highest reaching to five thousand feet. All activity is centred on Funchal town, as young Madeirans have no desire to live in the isolated communities that dot the interior and northern coastline. 

We had an ear popping trip around the countryside, one moment in the valley bottom and a short while later up amongst the clouds. We saw hillsides that had formerly been terraced and cultivated  but that now lie abandoned.

Watsonia flowers growing on the hillside. 

In Santana a few of the traditional thatched houses have been maintained as tourist shops. (One being a flower shop where I bought white Watsonia bulbs, agapanthus and other tempting items.)

A front garden filled just with flax; simple but very lovely.

Cobbled pavements everywhere,

and clouds.

Funchal, Madeira.

We have just returned from a week on the semi-tropical Portuguese island of Madeira. It is set in the Atlantic Ocean 600 km from the coast of Morocco. Not for nothing is it known as the island of flowers.  

The flowers sellers in Funchal market wear traditional dress, which comprises a colourful striped skirt in a heavy woollen fabric, a white blouse and a decorated red bodice piped and laced with green. They have soft boots on their feet and sitting  amongst their exotic blooms these women create  a very vibrant scene.

 

Looking down from the balconied first floor to the centre of the indoor market. 

Most of the flowers on sale are not indigenous to the island, having been introduced from South Africa and elsewhere. The arum lilies are a native species, and, together with agapanthus flowers, can be found growing everywhere in profusion.

The fruit and vegetable stalls are just as colourful, and while chillies and bananas are familiar to me

other fruits are not.

And I am no wiser when I've read the label!

We catch a local bus from the centre of town and head up the hill to visit the Botanical Garden. It's quite a hairy ride along very steep, narrow streets with many sharp zigzag bends.

Far below cruise ships can be seen in Funchal harbour.

Oh, joy, topiary! I love it. I'm waiting patiently for a yew plant at home to become large enough to shape.
Now I'm starting to think that just one shape will not be enough!