To walk a Madeiran levada is, more often than not, to walk through the Laurisilva — the subtropical laurel forest that cloaks the island's high northern slopes and is the very reason the water channels have anything to carry. Inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999 under natural criteria (ix) and (x), the Laurisilva of Madeira is the largest surviving area of laurel forest on Earth, the finest relict of a forest type that blanketed southern Europe and the Mediterranean basin during the Tertiary period, roughly 15 to 40 million years ago. When that ancient climate cooled and dried, the laurel forests of the continent vanished. They survive today almost exclusively in Macaronesia — Madeira, the Azores and the Canaries — and nowhere more completely than here.
Scale and primeval character
The inscribed forest covers about 15,000 hectares (150 km²), which amounts to roughly 20% of the island's surface, concentrated in the wetter, mist-bound high country of the north. Of this, an estimated 90% is primary, never-felled forest — true old growth, with til trees reckoned to be many centuries old, the remaining tenth being mid-twentieth-century secondary regrowth. UNESCO describes it as an "outstanding relict" of immense scientific value; the forest type itself is sometimes dated to over 20 million years. (Sources broadly converge on the 15,000 ha / 20% / 90% figures; some ecological literature cites the surrounding evergreen ecoregion as larger and the laurel forest as nearer 16% of total island forest cover — the discrepancy reflects different definitions of "Laurisilva" versus the wider ecoregion.)
Endemic flora
The canopy is dominated by four evergreen trees of the family Lauraceae, all icons of the forest:
- Til (Ocotea foetens) — the giant of the Laurisilva, the great gnarled, lichen-draped trees that make the Fanal plateau look primeval.
- Vinhático (Persea indica) — the "Madeira mahogany," prized historically for its richly coloured timber.
- Barbusano (Apollonias barbujana) — a Macaronesian endemic with durable wood.
- Madeira laurel / loureiro (Laurus novocanariensis) — the namesake, glossy and aromatic.
Beneath and beyond them thrive a remarkable endemic flora: Madeira hosts dozens of endemic vascular plants, including the spectacular blue flower-spikes of the Pride of Madeira (Echium candicans), the Madeira orchid (Dactylorhiza foliosa) that favours the forest's damp shade, the rare white-flowered Goodyera macrophylla, and the giant cranesbill (Geranium maderense).
Endemic and notable fauna
The forest's signature animal is the Trocaz pigeon (Columba trocaz), also called the Madeira laurel pigeon or long-toed pigeon — a grey, pink-breasted bird with a silvery neck patch, endemic to Madeira and now its only native pigeon after extirpation from Porto Santo. It feeds on laurel berries and is a key seed disperser of the forest itself; once driven down by deforestation, it has recovered to an estimated 7,500–10,000 birds and is rated Least Concern. The Madeira firecrest (Regulus madeirensis), split as a full species only in 2003, is among the smallest birds in Europe at around 9–10 cm and 5 g, haunting the tree heaths and laurel relicts. Overhead, the critically rare Zino's petrel (Pterodroma madeira) — Europe's most endangered seabird, with only around 160 breeding pairs — nests on the high central massif above the forest. The Laurisilva also shelters over 500 endemic invertebrate species.
Fog drip: how the forest feeds the levadas
The forest is not merely scenery for the levadas — it is their hydrological engine. Orographic cloud sits across the island between roughly 800 and 1,600 m for more than 200 days a year, and the Laurisilva occupies precisely that cloud belt. The trees, mosses and lichens comb water droplets directly from the passing fog — "horizontal" or occult precipitation — which then drips to the forest floor. This cloud-water interception can supply as much as a third (around 33%) of total water input during the dry season, recharging aquifers and feeding the springs and streams that the levadas tap and carry from the rain-rich north to the cultivated, thirstier south. Walk the Levada do Caldeirão Verde (PR9) from Queimadas, the Levada da Portela from Ribeiro Frio, the Levada do Rei (PR18), or the misty Vereda do Fanal (PR13), and the channel at your feet is carrying water the forest itself wrung from the clouds.