Island of Madeira Webcams

Category: Panoramic

Madeira is a Portuguese archipelago that lies just north of Tenerife, Canary Islands, in the north Atlantic Ocean and an outermost region of the European Union.

The archipelago itself is a series of oceanic volcanic islands that date back to the Miocene (about 20 million years ago), and constructed from a hotspot in the Earth’s crust of the African Tectonic Plate.

The island of Madeira is at the top of a massive shield volcano that rises about 3.7 mi from the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, on the Tore underwater mountain range. The volcano formed atop an east-west rift in the oceanic crust along the African Plate, beginning during the Miocene epoch over 5 million years ago, continuing into the Pleistocene until about 700,000 years ago.

This was followed by extensive erosion, producing two large amphitheatres open to south in the central part of the island. Volcanic activity later resumed, producing scoria cones and lava flows atop the older eroded shield. The most recent volcanic eruptions were on the west-central part of the island only 6,500 years ago, creating more cinder cones and lava flows.

The archipelago is considered to be the first territorial discovery of the exploratory period of the Portuguese Age of Discovery.