Miradouro Bica da Cana

There are a few spots on Madeira I knew we would have to get up long before sunrise to really experience the beauty of.

Bica da Cana was the most important on my list. In Madeira, it is called a Miradouro.

Miradouro’s are viewpoints with spaces to sit and rest. They are scattered all over the island and usually located at the highest points of the particular hill or mountain they are located on.

Located at an altitude of 1580 metres (5,125 feet), Bica da Cana is the perfect Miradouro to experience the sunrise.

During my research prior to visiting, I read that if you have a bit of time to spend on the island, always try and visit your top destinations first. That way, if it works out, great, but if the weather doesn’t cooperate, you still have some time to visit again. Madeira has multiple micro-climates, so I had been watching the weather for the entire week before we arrived and I knew our first week would include some exceptionally clear weather. Since Bica da Cana was high on my list, we made sure we attempted this spot early on.

The day we visited, the weather was forecast to be a perfectly clear, crisp day. Hovering around +6 C overnight, which meant there was an excellent chance that the high pressure would provide us with a cold blue sky, and rising to about +10 C at the viewpoint by sunrise at 8:11 am. The night before, we prepped our gear in advance of an early morning, woke around 5:45 am, had coffee and a good breakfast, got layered up with some merino wool undergarments and headed off.

The drive to Bica da Cana includes multiple hairpin switchbacks, which we were driving up on in a pitch black night, winds its way up to the top of the Paul da Serra Plateau. From Ponta do Sol, it took us about 45 minutes.

Google Maps told us we had arrived right around 7:45 am and the first thing we saw was the silhouette of a couple walking along the road, swinging a flashlight, so that was a good sign to us that we were in the right place.

There is a parking lot probably 1,000 feet down the road past the Casa de Abriga (Shelter House) on the left coming in. We parked in the dark, got out both our flashlights and headed down the road to find the trailhead. Fortunately for us, we were not alone. Two other couples pulled into the lot just after we arrived and headed in the same direction, so that made our finding the path a little easier.

From the road, it was a surprisingly long ten minute pre-dawn walk, along a rocky, uneven, muddy path, but wow, was it worth it !

Bica da Cana is probably the most underrated viewpoint on Madeira Island. During my research, I didn’t come across it for the first couple of months and that may have showed while we were here. There were only 3 or 4 other couples here with us, which was wonderful because we could all move around as we wanted and not feel like we were impeding each other as we all enjoyed the spectacle. Part of that may have been the fact that January is slow season, but that’s why we visited at this time of year – to have more space at popular destinations.

With views of Pico Ruivo, the highest peak on Madeira in the distance, as well as Pico do Arieiro, this vantage point is as beautiful as they come.

On our morning, we were privileged enough to experience a sea of clouds moving slowly through and across the valley beneath us, slightly backlit by the pre-dawn lighting, throwing up wisps of clouds which seemed to dance in front of the distant silhouetted mountains.

This ever-changing visual happening right in front of us was mesmerizing, and beyond magical. I found myself thinking, where else in the world could you see something just like this?

How incredible it was to witness this.

The sun rose up over the peaks in the distance and began to light up the world.