Camara de Lobos.
Madeira is a very popular tourist island and most towns have hotels and resorts that creates a lot of jobs and income. But in the middle of all this, you have Camara de Lobos, where the people still live life the way they did before mass tourism arrived.
If you like to grow bananas and go fishing when you are young and play cards when you are old, then you might want to move to Camara de Lobos. In a globalised world, where almost half the population of Madeira depends on tourism financially, Camara De Lobos is still living life the old fashioned way. Apart from a couple of souvenir shops by the harbour, then there is little to cater for tourists. The town only has one small tourist hotel and people are employed mainly in trades outside of tourism. For the same reason, it’s a low income town, with some social problems that are quite visible.
And the tourists come to Camara de Lobos because of that.
Camara de Lobos has a really beautiful setting.
But the tourists love Camara de Lobos, because of all the fishing boats and the banana plantations that serves as a backdrop to this little picturesque town. So oddly enough, this little town that does not care about the tourist trade, has ended up becoming one of the most popular places for the tour busses to stop.
Old men playing cards by the harbour in Camara de Lobos.
But I would still recommend you to visit. The town really has a lot of charm. Because it’s a low income place, you will most likely notice a few characters in town that are a little “quirky”. Bur to me that is part of the charm. I do not need everything to be nice and clean and for that reason, i really like Camara de Lobos myself. I love the way that people just go about with their life, being fishermen and banana farmers, because they prefer that to making more money, doing something they have less passion for.
One of the main streets in Camara de Lobos.
And by the Way: Winston Churchill used to hang out here, when he was on holiday on Madeira and wanted to escape his 5 star hotel and Cristiano Ronaldo grew up a couple of kilometers outside of this little charming town.
Camara de Lobos is beautiful.
