page_title: Madeira
section_title: Discovery
hierarchical_section_title: Madeira / History / Discovery
caption_attribution_description: &lt;a href="http://maps.google.com?q=32.64785340548885,-16.90994381904602(Funchal ( Portugal ))&amp;t=h"&gt;See where this picture was taken.&lt;/a&gt; &lt;a href="https://www.flickr.com/groups/geotagging/discuss/72157594165549916/"&gt;[?]&lt;/a&gt;
context_page_description: Madeira, officially the Autonomous Region of Madeira, is one of the two autonomous regions of Portugal. It is an archipelago situated in the North Atlantic Ocean, in a region known as Macaronesia, just under 400 kilometres to the north of the Canary Islands and 520 kilometres west of Morocco. Madeira is geographically located in the African Tectonic Plate, even though the archipelago is culturally, economically and politically European. Its total population was estimated in 2016 at 289,000. The capital of Madeira is Funchal, which is located on the main island's south coast.
  The archipelago includes the islands of Madeira, Porto Santo, and the Desertas, administered together with the separate archipelago of the Savage Islands. The region has political and administrative autonomy through the Administrative Political Statute of the Autonomous Region of Madeira provided for in the Portuguese Constitution. The autonomous region is an integral part of the European Union as an outermost region. Madeira generally has a very mild and moderated subtropical climate with mediterranean summer droughts and winter rain. There are many microclimates courtesy of the elevation changes.
context_section_description: Knowledge of some Atlantic islands, such as Madeira, existed before their formal discovery and settlement, as the islands were shown on maps as early as 1339.
  In 1418, two captains under service to Prince Henry the Navigator, João Gonçalves Zarco and Tristão Vaz Teixeira, were driven off course by a storm to an island they named Porto Santo (English: holy harbour) in gratitude for divine deliverance from a shipwreck. The following year, an organised expedition, under the captaincy of Zarco, Vaz Teixeira, and Bartolomeu Perestrello, traveled to the island to claim it on behalf of the Portuguese Crown. Subsequently, the new settlers observed "a heavy black cloud suspended to the southwest." Their investigation revealed it to be the larger island they called Madeira.
caption: Statue of João Gonçalves Zarco
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