The grand hotels, and who passed through

Long before it was famous for its visitors, Madeira was famous for its air. The same mild, even climate that drew the convalescent — the story told under the cure — drew, in time, the people who could afford to be ill in comfort. The grand hotels grew up to receive them, and their guest books became, almost by accident, a register of the age: a single quiet island where statesmen, writers and exiled royalty all, sooner or later, set down their bags.

Reid's Palace

The grandest of them opened in November 1891. Its founder, William Reid, was a Scottish émigré who had arrived with almost nothing and made his money the island's way — by hiring out quintas to the convalescent aristocrats who wintered in Funchal. From letting houses to building the house: Reid's Palace rose on the cliffs above the sea, and became the island's grand hotel for the wealthy and the titled.

Across the twentieth century its guest book ran the length of an era — from statesmen and writers to exiled royalty. Today the building continues as Belmond Reid's Palace, which is mentioned here only as a real-world point of reference; this record keeps no rooms and takes no bookings. What follows are a few of the names the house collected.

The emperor next door

When the exiled Emperor Charles I first reached Funchal in 1921, he did not stay at Reid's. He lodged instead at the Villa Vittoria, the house standing immediately beside it — so that, for a few strange months, a dying emperor and a luxury hotel shared a garden wall. It is the kind of proximity the island specialises in: the famous and the forgotten, the throne and the rented villa, divided by a hedge.

Churchill at his easel

Winston Churchill arrived in Madeira on 1 January 1950, aboard the liner Durban Castle, with his wife Clementine — the visit partly intended to mark Reid's reopening after the war. A week later, on 8 January 1950, he set up his easel at the entrance to the fishing village of Câmara de Lobos and painted the bay in oils. The viewpoint where he worked is now called the Miradouro Winston Churchill.

He did not finish his holiday. With a general election called in Britain, the stay was cut short and Churchill sailed home to campaign — leaving the bay, and the easel, for another year.

A single island, a single guest book, and an entire century turning its pages. The register

Shaw learns to tango

A quarter of a century earlier, the playwright George Bernard Shaw had landed in Madeira on 30 December 1924 and stayed into February 1925. He was sixty-eight. Between the sea air and the dancing floor, he took tango lessons from Reid's dancing instructor — and, in gratitude, left the man an autographed photograph. The inscription, which survives, reads: “to the only man who ever taught me anything.”

Napoleon's untouched cask

The island's most famous guest never came ashore. In the late summer of 1815 HMS Northumberland, carrying the defeated Napoleon into exile on St Helena, lay off Funchal on 23–25 August. The only Madeiran permitted aboard was Henry Veitch, the Scottish British consul and a wine merchant, who sent out fruit and a pipe of Madeira — a large cask of roughly six hundred bottles. Seasick and indifferent, Napoleon never opened it.

By island tradition, the emperor is said to have paid for the wine in gold coins, which Veitch is said to have buried beneath the cornerstone of Funchal's Anglican church. That part is legend, repeated more than it is proved. The cask, however, is documented: after Napoleon's death the wine returned to Madeira and was eventually bottled, becoming fabulously rare — and Churchill, the record holds, is said to have drunk a bottle of it at Reid's in 1950, closing a circle a century and a half wide.

That such a wine should have travelled to St Helena and back is fitting. Madeira was the prized wine of Georgian and Regency Britain and of the American colonies, shipped across the Atlantic by old British houses such as Blandy's, founded in 1811. The bottle in the emperor's cabin was, in its way, the most ordinary thing aboard.