Christ of Garajau

The solitary statue of the Christ of Garajau, resting on the promontory with the same name, faces the deep Atlantic Ocean on a chilly evening and watches over all the mariners at sea.

Older than the most iconic statues of Jesus around the world (The Christ of Corcovado dates from 1931 and Lisbon's Cristo-Rei dates from 1959), the Christ of Garajau was inaugurated in 1927 and from that year on stood as a reference on the Southern Madeira landscape to all the vessels passing by Funchal.

Not surprisingly the statue of the Redeemer gets the biggest respects from the Italian crews, whose Captains always consider the passage of their ships by that symbolic place as a moment of respectful spirituality.

Picture taken with Nikon P7100 held over a rocky wall. Self-timer exposure of 0.6 secs at f/8. ISO800 in JPEG file corrected for saturation, contrast, sharpness and digital noise in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 4.3

Cane sugar mill

Madeira has a secular tradition in the plantation of sugar cane for the purpose of producing white and raw sugar, and also sugar derivatives as bagasse and the famous sugar cane honey used profusely on the island's cuisine.

One of the oldest factories still laboring is located in the village of Calheta, on the South coast. With half-a-century of activity, the Sociedade dos Engenhos da Calheta is, today, a mixture of industrial unit and live museum, with daily visits by the tourists.

Sadly the sugar cane presses no longer operate with steam engines, having being replaced by electric ones a couple of years ago.

Funnels on the cane sugar mill of Calheta, on the South coat of Madeira.

Photo taken with Nikon D40X and cheap Nikkor AF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 G DX VR kit lens.

Post-processing in Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom.

Mafra. A baroque extravaganza.

It's, sometimes, for me hard to understand why do we devote so much time building monuments to our own vanity. But, anyway, the thing that scares us the most (like my fellow colleague :-) Joseph Conrad wisely wrote in Lord Jim) is oblivion. We are scared to death that everybody forgets our microscopic passage through this world as soon as we close our eyes. To avoid that, men built pyramids and palaces. Sometimes we also made wars and created a lot of pain and misery. Very few ascended to the immortality condition with anything related to the mankind well-being.

After visiting the Mafra monastery I'm still in doubt about the group where we should include the King João V, the monarch of the time and the idealist of this barroque extravaganza. Built in a time when the gold from Brasil was arriving to Lisboa in buckets, this was, probably, his signature for posterity.

Strangely, and according to the late great historian José Herman Saraiva, this massive palace (still one of the biggest in the world) was built for nothing, since nobody from the royalty ever lived there. Probably turned down by the sheer size of the palace and its cold emptiness, the royals only visited Mafra for hunting games in the nearby "Tapada".

The palace, also a monastery, remained occupied by the monks until 1834, year when the religious orders were extinct in Portugal.

Nowadays, it's a national monument and also houses the Infantry School of the Portuguese Army.

Probably the most breathtaking division in the monastery, the fabulous library, housing 35000 books, rivals in sheer size and opulence with others built during the Renaissance years all over Europe. According to the Wikipedia, the tv miniseries Gulliver's Travels, from NBC, was shot partially in this amazing Rococo division. You'd have to visit it to understand why.

Handheld photo taken with Nikon D40X and Sigma 10-20mm EX DC HSM f/4-5.6.

Post-processing in Adobe Photoshop CS3.