The volcanic lava pools at the end of the Madeira road — natural seawater swimming pools formed in the hardened lava flow at the island's northwestern tip, surrounded by Atlantic cliff faces 300m high
Porto Moniz is a small coastal settlement on the extreme northwestern tip of Madeira (population 2,700, the smallest municipality on the island), 90km and 2.5 hours from Funchal on the Madeira coastal road (the Via Expresso motorway on the southern coast, then the spectacular northern coast road cut into cliff faces with tunnels and viaducts after Sao Vicente). The defining attraction of Porto Moniz is the natural lava pools (Piscinas Naturais) at the base of the volcanic lava flow that extends from the northwestern cliffs into the Atlantic: the ancient lava (from the volcanic eruptions that…
Porto Moniz (named for Francisco Moniz, the 16th-century landowner who received the northwestern tip of Madeira as a land grant from the Portuguese Crown after the island's initial colonization in the 1420s) was historically a fishing and subsistence farming community on the most exposed Atlantic coastline in the archipelago. The volcanic geology of the northwestern tip (the 1.8-million-year-old flood basalt lava flows that created the platform on which the natural pools sit) was deposited in the most recent phase of Madeiran geological activity — younger than the island's central mountain ma…