LevadasMADEIRA
See today's best trail

About Levadas

What the Levadas score is, and what it is not

Madeira does not plan like other islands. A coast, a ridge and a high plateau sit within an hour of each other, and each keeps its own weather. It can be warm and clear where you are staying while the trail you picked is in cloud, in wind and far colder, at the same hour of the same day. A forecast for the town does not know that, and a guide written last season cannot: what decides your morning is not what the trail is like, it is what it is like today.

The version that works is not more research. It is leaving in the morning already knowing which open trail is the good one today, which hour it turns, and where you would go instead if it does not hold. That is what the number on this site is for: one reading, in place of the hour you would otherwise spend holding a forecast, a closure list and somebody's post from March against each other.

Whether that number deserves the trust is the rest of this page.

This is not a weather app. Levadas is decision support for a day on Madeira's trails, and a place to plan the days after that: save the trails and the Moments you want to catch, cloud seas, star fields, a waterfall running full, and My Plan sequences them against the forecast so a whole trip takes shape, not just one morning.

What the score is, and what it is not

The 0 to 100 score is an algorithmic suggestion for planning a day. It is not a safety clearance. It does not know that you are tired, that your boots are wrong, that you are walking with a six year old, or that the section you are on came apart in last night's rain. Treat it the way you treat a forecast: one input, and not the one that decides whether you turn back.

One thing overrides it completely. If IFCN (Instituto das Florestas e Conservação da Natureza), Madeira's forest and trail authority, has closed a trail, the score is 0 and the page says closed, however good the weather looks and however much the rest of the data disagrees. Official status beats the algorithm every time, and there is no setting anywhere that changes that.

That is also why the same trail can read differently at different hours. The number is today's reading, not a fixed rating of the walk: a morning that starts clear can still cloud over by midday, and the score moves with it instead of holding on to how the day began.

Reading one forecast for the whole island would miss the reason this site exists: the coast and the ridge run different weather within the same hour, and the same is true along a single trail from its trailhead to its summit. So each trail's score is computed along its own elevation profile, not only at the trailhead, weighing cloud, wind, visibility and a handful of other live conditions against each other rather than trusting any single one. A worse reading higher up the trail can pull the number down; a better one at the summit never lifts it. That asymmetry is deliberate, the same caution a guide uses before calling a route fine.

None of those readings is treated as essential on its own. When one is missing or has gone stale, it is left out of that trail's calculation rather than guessed at, so the number narrows what it is judging instead of ever being invented. 38 live and official sources keep the wider app current end to end, weather, closures, crowding, hazards; only a handful of them ever change the number on this page, and the one reading the whole score depends on is explained just below.

IFCN publishes its own record of every trail's status, official and public, and you do not have to take our word for it: see their register.

See what every trail is scoring right now, and the hours that actually work

The rules this project holds itself to

Two of them decide what you see, and they are the reason a page here will sometimes tell you nothing at all.

If a walk goes wrong

This page tells you when a trail is worth walking. It cannot come and get you if something goes wrong. If you or someone with you needs real help, one of these numbers is the fastest way to reach it. Rescue in Madeira is free.

For the full checklist, what to pack and what to do if the weather turns, open Safety in the app.

What gets checked on the ground

Official records and open datasets are where the numbers start, and a file is not a path. So the trails get walked. Where a page sends you, which trailhead a road actually reaches, the point where a track stops matching the ground: that gets checked in person, and when the walk disagrees with the file, the file is what changes.

Many of the photographs on this site were taken on the trail, on the day, by us. The rest are credited on each trail's page to the photographer or to the council that published them, with the licence.

The same rule applies to the figures. A trail's distance here is the number printed on IFCN's own panel, carried over as the panel states it rather than adjusted to sit neatly beside a GPS track, because the two are measuring different things and pretending otherwise would hide that. Where a council and the park authority have given one levada two different names, both names stay searchable instead of one being quietly chosen. Nothing here is copied from other hiking sites.

This site does not claim that every trail on it has been walked. It claims that its corrections come from the ground and from the official document, never from another website.

What is free, and what costs money

Free

Everything on these public pages is free and needs no account: distances, official status and closures, what each trail costs to book, the weather guides, the GPX tracks, the webcams.

Paid

What costs money is the dated layer, the part that is different at 7am and at noon: the live score, the rankings, whole path weather instead of trailhead weather, and the exact window for a Magic Moment. The split is deliberate. The facts belong to whoever wants them. The call is the part that took the work, and it is the part a pass buys.

Bugs, corrections and feature requests

Something wrong, something broken, or something you wish this did? Write in. Every message is read and every one is considered, and corrections get made. Bug reports that name the trail, the date and time, and what you expected against what you saw get fixed fastest. Send it to info@levadas.live.

For bloggers and site owners

Running a Madeira travel blog or hiking resource? Our live data widgets (trail status, alerts, fees and climate normals) are free to embed, carry fresh data, and include a levadas.live backlink by default.

Common questions

Is Levadas an official source?

No. IFCN is the authority for Madeira's walking routes: it classifies them and it closes them. Levadas reads what IFCN publishes and shows it alongside everything else, but if their site and this one disagree, theirs is the version that counts.

Can I rely on the score for safety?

No, and no score of this kind should be relied on that way. It is a planning aid built from public data, which is why every page that shows one says so. Check the official status yourself, look at the sky, and turn back when the path stops matching what you were told. In Portugal, including Madeira, the emergency number is 112.

Does the score account for trail difficulty or my fitness level?

No. The score reads the conditions on a trail today, not the trail itself or the person walking it. A hard route and an easy one are judged by the same weather and the same official status. Neither your fitness nor the trail's difficulty changes the number. Read the trail's own page and its GPX track for what the walk actually demands before you go.

What is a Magic Moment, and how is it different from the score?

The score is a reading for a whole day: is this trail worth walking, right now. A Magic Moment is narrower, a specific spot and a specific window, when light, weather and the sea or sky line up for something that does not last. Madeira stages these for minutes, not hours, and the live match for each one sits behind the same paid layer as the score.

This page says nothing about today's conditions, what a levada is, what a trail costs, its GPX track, this month's weather, or the newsfeed. Each of those has its own page: which trails are open today · what a levada actually is · Which trails are free · Download free GPX tracks · Madeira weather by month · active fire and weather alerts right now

Full source list, licences and attributions: Legal and payments.