A Day of Sightseeing in Funchal, Madeira, Part 2

Next we drove up to the famous botanical garden, a must-see if you go to Madeira. The garden is expansive and features a wide variety of plants and trees from all over the world, including a fruit tree that my family had in front of the house I grew up in and one that I have not seen in a very long time. Since it was huge (20 acres), we could only visit a little portion. Near the entrance, there is a beautiful Victorian house that shows a wide variety of taxidermied (?) birds and other animals, quite creepy if you ask me, so I did not photograph any of it.




Porch of the Victorian house.



The centerpiece of the garden I think is the colorful ground cover. It's the image that comes up each time you Google the garden. It certainly is beautiful.









My favorite portion of the garden is the succulents area.

















The tree that brought me back to my old home.




We were all excited to see this fruit-bearing tree that was part of all of our childhood, In the Philippines this was called "macopa".

The bonus of this visit was the presence of the resident kitty. It gave us a warm welcome, encouraging us to pet and scratch it and wasn't afraid to receive hugs. Thankfully, there was very few people in the garden that day that we had the kitty all to ourselves.







The views from the garden were spectacular. Seemed like everywhere we went on this trip, the views were outstanding.


There are so many tunnels here. We drove through many of them.





I'm not done with posting about Madeira just yet. Despite the short time allotment here, we managed to stuff it with plenty of sightseeing. There's more, you'll see.