Madeira weather
Madeira weather forecast: 10 and 14 days ahead
Searches for a 10 or 14-day Madeira outlook have spiked lately, usually from people booking flights or accommodation before the trip and wanting a read on the window. Here is the real forecast, run live from the same data our engine uses, plus an honest read on how much to trust each day of it.
Funchal, day by day
Days 8+ (shaded) carry lower confidence, as with any provider. Read them as a trend.
See live trail conditions This is one forecast for an island that does not have one weather. The pass runs it per trail, re-checked every 20 min, and names the one worth your morning.How far ahead can you actually trust it?
Days 1 to 7 come from the same model class every serious forecaster uses, and they are usually close. Past day 7, and especially past day 10, the atmosphere's chaos catches up with any model, ours or the BBC's or anyone else's: the further out you look, the more a forecast describes a trend (mild, unsettled, likely wet) rather than a promise (rain at 3pm on Thursday).
We show the full run below rather than cut it off at day 7, because the trend is still useful for booking flights or planning a trip window. Just weight day 12 as "probably" and day 2 as "almost certainly." For an actual hike, re-check the morning of; for the mountains specifically, altitude changes everything a flat 14-day number can't show, which is what our microclimate guide and the live per-trail score are for.
A number is only as good as the tool that produced it, and the apps disagree here more than they do on a flat coast. See how the Madeira weather apps compare. A forecast is not a warning. When an official one is out, it belongs in a different list: active fire and weather alerts right now.
Before any of these days matters you have to land, and that has its own threshold: why wind, not rain, diverts Madeira flights.
No outlook reaches a dated sky event a year out, and our own page says so plainly: the next solar eclipse seen from Madeira.
Is there a Madeira weather map?
Not on this page. What you get here is a day by day forecast for one point on the south coast, Funchal, and no map at all. That is a limit we are stating rather than a gap we are hiding: a single colour laid over the whole island would have to be right for the coast and for the peaks at the same time, and on Madeira those two rarely agree.
The useful version of a map here is not one picture. It is knowing which of the island's climates you will be standing in: the drier south, the wetter north, or the summits, which run colder than either coast all year. That split, and the numbers behind it, is the subject of our microclimate guide.
If you would rather look at the sky than read a number, the live cams around the island do exactly that, which is usually what people are after when they search for a map: Live webcams.
Common questions
Is a 14-day Madeira weather forecast accurate?
Not in the way a 2-day forecast is. Beyond about day 7 to 10, any forecast provider (ours included) is showing you a statistical trend, not a locked-in prediction. It is still useful for deciding whether a week looks broadly wet or dry before you book flights, just not for planning an exact hour.
How many days ahead should I plan a Madeira hike?
For the trails, plan loosely more than about 5 days out, and treat the number as a direction rather than a fact. Book flights and accommodation off the trend if you like, but leave the actual trail choice to the week-of forecast and, ideally, the live per-trail score the morning of.
Does a 10-day Madeira forecast cover the mountains too?
A generic forecast almost always means Funchal or the airport. Madeira's peaks run a different, colder, cloudier weather system of their own, so a fine 14-day outlook for the coast tells you very little about Pico do Arieiro or Pico Ruivo. Our explains why, with the numbers.
Is there a live weather radar for Madeira?
Not on this site. What you have here is a forecast rather than a nowcast: the rain figure beside each day is the chance of rain in Funchal on that day, not a picture of where rain is falling right now. Radar answers the next hour; this page answers the next two weeks. And when the weather turns into an official warning, that is a third thing again, and it belongs on our alerts list.