Twenty seconds of The Far West, written for this very spot. On the tour it plays by itself as you arrive.
The viewpoint here is free and stunning on its own, a clifftop balcony over the wild north-west coast, with a tiny patchwork of green fields impossibly far below at the waterline. But the real story is how the people down there get to those fields.
This is the Achadas da Cruz cable car, and it is claimed to be the steepest in Europe, a 98 per cent gradient, dropping 450 metres down a near-vertical cliff face in about five minutes. It wasn't built for tourists. It was built so the farmers of the Fajã da Quebrada Nova, the sliver of farmland at the bottom, could get themselves and their crops up and down without risking a deadly climb. Before it, that was an hour-plus scramble down a cliff with a basket on your back.
Stand at the top and just take in the audacity of it: a working farm clinging to the sea at the foot of a wall of rock, reached by a cabin that feels like it's going straight down. A return ticket is about five euros if you want to ride it; the view from the top costs nothing. Either way, this is the Madeira that flat-land countries can't imagine: a place where people farmed the unfarmable, and built a clever little miracle to make it possible.
Local tip: check the cable car's hours and that it's running before you make the long drive out. It pauses at midday and stops for wind. Even if it's closed, the clifftop viewpoint alone is worth the detour. Pair it with Porto Moniz or Ponta do Pargo; they're all in the same north-west corner.
