Essential asked the Director of Brand and Communication of NOS Madeira, what is it that makes Madeira "his".
While contradictory, islanders experience both feelings: joy and suffocation.
The island is the home from which we depart, to which we return, where we grew up and failed, where we laugh and exist. Nature is felt through the sea, that major surrounding us and shaping our temper, calling to us at all times. The sea out of leisure, for company, as a way out, is something no islander can afford to ignore in feeling and condition.
The mountain. In such a short space of national territory, as if an iceberg in the middle of the Atlantic, Madeira is home to uncountable endemic species, of both fauna and flora, which makes us truly unique and constitute an environmental reserve of a value that is, unfortunately, for many Madeirans, incalculable.
Festivity. Madeira does, indeed, as festivities the year round but “the” festivity happens in December and lasts for the whole month. Due to specific circumstances, Madeiran Christmas has, for a long time, been a special celebration in which, beyond traditions and memories, faces are generally much more open, close and happier.
All of Madeira is captured in an environment which makes these, the only vacations in which it is better to stay on the island than to leave it.
Sometimes, the island can also be somewhat of a hardship, a state of suffocation. It is where one leaves or where one comes to, never a passageway. Geographically disconnected from Europe, we are farther away from much which, in some way, escapes us.
