"Madeira cannot be really understood without exploring Porto Santo. That is why the best route to follow is that of the first Portuguese explorers who landed on Porto Santo a year before they set fire to the impenetrable forest which, from the sea to the mountains, covered the future city of Funchal.
Porto Santo manages to provide a taster for the mystery of Madeira. This mystery would not exist without the startling and unexplainable difference between the sandy dryness and Mediterranean climate of Porto Santo and the tropical lushness of the Atlantic climate in the larger of the islands. The sheer force of Madeira should be viewed through the mirror which reflects the luminous abstraction of Porto Santo: the two images are inverted, the senses reversed for a single insular enigma."
Vicente Jorge Silva
Publisher: Maurício Abreu and Victor Figueiredo
Photography by Maurício Abreu
Text by Vicente Jorge Silva
Design by José Teófilo Duarte
English version by Vanessa Seed
1st edition: June 1993
ISBN: 972-95897-0-4
Size: 23,5 x 31 cm; 96 pages
107 colour photographs
