Madeira · Live webcams

Madeira's live webcams, on the map that adds the forecast

A webcam is an honest picture of one place. What it cannot do is stand in for a trail somewhere else. Cloud on Madeira forms against the terrain, so the same hour can be bright at the coast and inside the cloud a few kilometres inland and several hundred metres higher.

All 29 cams, and the nearest marked trail to each

Straight-line distance from each camera to the nearest marked trail, the height of the camera itself, and the height that trail starts at. Read the two height columns together: that gap is why the picture is not a forecast.

Streams by their public providers. The map is free; no account needed.

Photographers read these cams before they drive, because the light they want lasts minutes. Where and when it happens is the subject of the field guides to Madeira's signature shots.

What this camera can and cannot tell you

26 July 2026, 11:30. Rabaçal: full car park, grey wall. Our reading for that same minute: 55% cloud, 32 km visibility, 0 mm of rain, 18 degrees. The camera sits 37 m from the start of PR6 Levada das 25 Fontes. The waterfalls are 4.3 km further on, at the bottom of the valley.

Which is right? Neither, on its own. You cancelled a walk on 1 frame of a spot you were not going to.

We tested this instead of assuming it. Levadas ran a webcam calibration loop that compared a vision label of each camera's image against the weather sub-score we had computed for the trail nearest to it, and used the gap to nudge the scoring weights. We retired that loop on 20 July 2026 because the gap was never valid ground truth: a camera frames a patch of sky that does not represent the cloud sitting over the trail's own cell. That failed experiment is exactly why the live score reads the weather at the trail's own altitude every 20 minutes instead of reading a camera.

The evening cam check has a documented failure mode: Madeira's cloud rebuilds and dissolves overnight, so what the lens saw at 21:00 says little about 07:00. Our engine models the same sky the cams point at, from pressure levels, marine and microclimate data, and turns that into a per-trail score. Watch the cam for the mood; read the microclimate and the live score for the decision.

A camera only shows what is happening right now, at one point. For the rest of the week, see how the Madeira weather apps compare.

And if the question is what the coming days look like rather than which app to trust, that has a page of its own: the 10 and 14-day Madeira outlook.

Cams are also the fallback when the sky itself is the event, and the next dated one has its own page: the next solar eclipse seen from Madeira.

Common questions