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Madeira, Portugal (Part 2): Funchal Vegan Food, Lodging, and More

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As discussed in the previous post, Madeira, the little Portuguese island off the coast of West Africa, is an amazing little paradise of mountains, gardens, and overall pleasantness. In this post, we are getting down to what matters: the vegan food, and the hotels. Although the remote location means the extreme vegan ballerness of mainland European cities hasn’t reached Funchal yet, there are still lots of good options and cute restaurants to check out. And as far as lodging goes, we stayed in THREE different hotels over this trip! Okay, one was in London and one was not planned, but you’ll see! We had an incredible time in Madeira and you can read about all the sights and stuff to do here.

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yep this was taken during a break in barfing. (‘oh it’s pronounced bar-fay’)
My top restaurant recommendation is Coracao (pretend it’s a squiggly c!) Vegano, which has been around, and vegan, since 1973! Amazing job guys. The food took a minute but we had just flown in and we were super hungry so it probably seemed longer than it really was. Before we share the food, look how adorable the restaurant itself is!
Since like I said we were so hungry, we did our usual thing of ordering too much food. We ordered a wrap, a thing called Vegan Lust, and sushi. So yeah, the offerings are eclectic, like lots of vegan cafes, without one clear vision or cuisine. But who cares!
First up, the vegan plate of lust. It contained crispy chicken slabs (is slabs not a good word for food?), bacon slabs (again I ask but what is a better way to describe it?), and salad. It was fine! I love salad and the various vegan slabs were fun.
Next up, the wrap. There’s only one wrap option, the Crispy Wrap, and it has crispy vegan chicken with veggies and salad inside. I loved the filling and wish the wrap itself was sturdier; it fell victim to the disease that kills most wraps – sogginess. Ugh I love wraps so much but haaaate when the wrapping gets too soggy I might dry heave just thinking about it. There is nothing else in the world where suuuuuch a tiny change in status makes me go from loving it to literally barfaying from it. But anyway, it wasn’t as soggy as other wraps I’ve seen in my day, so it was pretty good.
Lastly, sushi! Or what they call Shingen Zushi! It’s a fried tempeh roll and it was DERN GOOD. Man I love tempeh sushi. I want this again! So the food overall at Coracao (squiggly!) is decent, but it’s a must go because it’s kind of a Funchal vegan institution. And it’s rare to find an all-vegan place! I think this is the only one in Funchal, actually. And I adore that they are not shying away from announcing themselves as such or wimping out with referring to some ‘plant-based’ bullshit. Look at the entrance!
Just in case ‘vegano’ in the name wasn’t enough! Love it.

The next restaurant we tried that is worth sharing was called Copaki, which is a little farther down the coast, closer to the Contemporary Art Museum. They aren’t vegetarian but they have a veggie/vegan menu that is really great. Unfortunately, I ordered the wrong thing, like I can’t even believe I ordered it. I had the choice between deep fried aubergine (eggplant), braised tofu (omg want), lasagna (what!!), or fajitas, and like a G-D MORON I chose fajitas, momentarily forgetting that the main component in veggie fajitas are bell peppers and I FORKING HATE bell peppers! What was I thinking? I think I was distracted by the prospect of guacamole. Ughhh I had to eat so many red peppers and they make me nauseous.

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first of all that’s not fajitas
Best (not) of all was that the ‘side of vegetables’ was more bell peppers. I mean. So don’t be like me, because I think if you ordered something that there’s a chance of you actually enjoying (e.g. not your least favorite veggie??) then we are all good at Copaki. Still can’t believe it. Luckily, I had some other dishes and they were great. Hard to mess up, but great.
Including:
BRUSCHETTA! I love bruschetta hard. I love it even more when people pronounce it right. (Hot tip: You’re probably doing it wrong.)
Ours had mushrooms on top! Approved!
Next, we shared a bowl of soup. I honestly forget what kind of soup this was, but it was a pureed light colored vegetable (there aren’t that many so just you decide) and it was good.
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what brand of soup are you
But guess what else! They had a nice vegan dessert, can you believe it? I was expecting nothing more than fruit plates or fruit sorbets, but here they had a vegan puddingy flan type thing with candied puffed wheat bits on top. NICE!
Overall, it was a nice meal, and Copaki is a little more upscale than Corasquiggle if you are looking for a date night or something.

We also stopped by Gigi Sumos one day, a juice bar chain that is on HappyCow and says it has vegan bagels and salads too. Well, they don’t really. They can make a salad vegan by removing all the stuff in it, and they don’t have vegan salad dressings! I asked the staff, but you say you offer vegan salads; how can you do that if you don’t have vegan salad dressings? And you know what they did? They offered me MUSTARD or SWEET CHILI SAUCE. Like, both condiments straight from their bottles, undoctored to be palatable as salad dressings. I mean I chose the sweet chili but DAYUM.

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even with avocado it’s sad! and look more bell peppers
Luckily, after that unfortunate stop, we went to the MOST BEAUTIFUL land of produce – Mercado dos Lavradores! This famous market is a must-do for tourists. It’s a giant building full of food vendors. The main hall is vegetables and fruit and nuts and spices and dried fruit and all kinds of good stuff, and there are restaurants and hot food vendors all along the sides. Because it’s so touristed, the produce is expensive, but you can get INSANE stuff. This is where I found my most favorite avocado of all time. You ready? She ready.
Look at those gorgeous things! Do you see the giant avocado? We bought that one that is standing upright – it was bigger than my face. Luckily our travel was intra-EU so we got to bring it home! It made a lot of guacamole. Okay so because it was so big it was kind of bland, but I don’t care, it’s so cool. If it were a rocking chair it would be a stop on a long-drive through the American West.
I don’t have a picture of the next coolest find we made in the Mercado, but I remember it vividly. A few vendors stopped us and made us try pieces of a special Madeiran hybrid fruit called – I shit you not – ‘ADAM’S RIB’. Making things even more interesting, it’s a hybrid of pineapple and banana. And against all odds it sort of reminded me of custard apple! It was more fun than delicious but it still was good enough for us to buy a few. SO FUN.

Okay, that’s it for food in this post. Sadly, we didn’t get to what many say is the best restaurant in Madeira for vegans, Restaurant Olives, but maybe next time. And there’s some happy news: the next Madeira post will be a fancy restaurant review, a part of the Vegan Michelin series! 

LODGING
Funchal is the kind of place where you really will want a baller resort to stay in. Without sandy beaches, you’ll want to swim in a nice pool. Also, this isn’t the kind of city like Paris or London where you want to spend as many seconds as possible seeing all the sights because there’s never enough time to see it all (‘there’s no time! there’s NEVER ANY TIME!’). That’s not the vibe here. You’ll see some stuff like I shared in the previous post but you’re gonna want to relax in the hotel. Also, the hotels get the most beautiful beachfront so the views are amazing. We did a lot of research trying to find the nicest place that was still a value for money, and we decided on the Porto Bay resort. Porto Bay actually is three different resorts, and if you stay in one you have access to the amenities (restaurants, gyms, pools, tennis courts, kids clubs (so many families), mini golf, &c) in all three, so it was a great decision. They have the Cliff Bay (which I think is the most expensive), the Porto Santa Maria, and the Porto Mare. We chose the latter. And we liked it, and we loved it. 
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one of many sun bed areas
This was the view from inside our room.
What’s out there, you ask? Let’s go see!
Oh it’s just one of the FIVE pools at the Porto Mare alone! While I of course swam in this one just to have done it, it wasn’t super hot to make it my regular pool. Luckily, some of those five are indoor. If you know me, you know I love an indoor pool, like to a weird degree. Look how beautiful these options were!
That one was so big it snaked its way to be part outdoor pool. SO FUN.
There were also jacuzzis and steam rooms all over the place. And while the gym was a little hard to get to (down to the basement and then up again sort of?) it was a pretty good gym! My only sadness about this stay is that there were tennis courts literally outside our wing but we didn’t play.

The food at Porto Mare was pretty good too. As with all hotel buffet breakfasts, there was tons of cereal and fruit but nothing great on the hot food side. But, they had Alpro yogurt! So it was overall a win.

Now I bet right now you are thinking, if you loved this place so much why did you say you stayed at a different place? Well, Madeira can get crazy winds, and so it wasn’t a huge surprise that our flight home to London was cancelled because of them. EasyJet transported our entire flight from the airport to a hotel that was much, much better than I expected of EasyJet (I expected a trash motel). It was called the Pestana Ocean Bay.

It’s that green bit. Not the nicest place, but still pretty good. Checking in the entire flight took hours, sadly, as the hotel was not ready for such a madhouse. We were originally given a basement room but it had ants (omg maybe it was a trash motel and I forgot) so I went back to reception and demanded we be moved, and we got a much nicer room on the top floor! Awesome.

We were all given tokens for the dinner buffet, which was fine. Nothing special but they had enough dishes out in the giant buffet that were veg. We talked to some fellow passengers (ack) and wondered when we’d be notified about our rescheduled flight. The email came late that night: they were putting us on a flight the next night/morning at 1 AM!!! ONE. AM. And since this is Madeira, most of the people were supes old! This sucked. We’d get in to London at what, 3-4 am? And back home no earlier than 5am and have to go to work? No no NO this will not stand! Luckily, they offered money back if you chose not to accept their shitastic rescheduling, so we refused and booked a NORMAL HUMAN TIMED flight with British Airways. We still had another whole morning to explore though, so we walked along the beach and the caves near this end of Funchal.

Okay so that’s two hotels; what’s this talk about a third? Well our flight out of London was at 7am, so we decided that rather than getting up at 3 or 4 am beforehand and hating the world on our first day in Madeira, we’d sleep at the airport and only dislike the world on our first day. We stayed at the YotelAir in Gatwick Airport and you know what? It was super fun and comfy. It’s a pod hotel, meaning the rooms are tiny little compartments and you feel like you’re on a submarine or something. (Or an overnight train!!) But it was clean and comfy and even though everything was a weird purple haze, it was great! Nice bed too.
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ahhh so similar to our train journeys!
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There are buttons to bring the bed down for sleeping!
The check-in process was so smooth, maybe the smoothest at any hotel ever. The staff was super nice. And it was weirdly fun to be able to change into pajamas and then go out and shop at the airport Boots and stuff!
So except for the aforementioned fancy dinner, that’s it for Madeira! I hope you consider it for a future vacay, especially if you are old or have kids. I hope to go back someday! Oh and here is a look at my favorite Funchal graffiti:
Send it to your friends named Sam and have a good day!
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