Levada Tunnels

While staying in Madeira a week ago we took a day out to hike one of the famous "Levada's". These are channels dug into the mountains along which rain water flows down into the coastal areas for crop irrigation, there are thousands of KM of these channels and they make for superb hiking trails through the mountains and hills in the interior of the island.

In the photograph below you can see one of these Levada channels and water still flows through most of them, as can be seen here.

Sometimes the channels needed to pass over mountains in order to reach their destinations, obviously water doesn't flow up hill and since most of the Levada were made during the 16th, 17th and 18th century pumping wasn't an option so they built tunnels! 25km of tunnels were built over the centuries and many still exist and are used today, we walked through one such tunnel, it was over a kilometer long and quite wet but fascinating (see picture at the top) It was rumored that the early Levada were dug out by African slaves and that later ones used prisoners from continental Portugal in order to perform this dangerous and laborious carving of these amazing structures out of bare rock, following the contours of the mountains.

I shot a little video of the approach to the tunnel, where several Levada meet up and form a larger channel that transits the tunnel, see below..