One six-week window covering the illumination of the Funchal amphitheatre, the Christmas exhibits, Market Night, the New Year’s Eve firework display and the Chants of Epiphany — every date with its year.
Dates on this page are the announced ones for 2026, 2027, and 2028, and every one is shown with its year. That is deliberate: the commonest error online is a day-and-month line copied forward from a previous edition.
Programme detail on this page last read July 27, 2026.
The illuminations go up at the start of December and stay up into January, which makes this the longest of the anchor events and the one most often quoted with the wrong end date. Inside it sit three distinct nights: Market Night in December, when central Funchal is effectively impassable until dawn; New Year’s Eve, the busiest night of the Madeiran year; and the Chants of Epiphany, which close the window in January.
FunchalCrowding: Busier than usualBusiest days: Very busy
Announced dates
One block per announced year. The window is the whole festival; the lines under it are the individual events the calendar names.
What the dates do not tell you, from official pages rather than from us. Anything that could not be attributed was left out.
The Christmas exhibits include an ethnographic village at Largo da Restauração, alongside a market selling fruit, plants, Madeira wine and sugarcane honey.
Market Night at the Farmers’ Market is published as a standing tradition on a fixed December date rather than as a per-year listing, so it is shown only for the years an official source actually covers.
The 2006 New Year display was recognised by the Guinness Book of Records as the largest fireworks display in the world. The recognition is for that year, not a standing title.
The two official sources disagree on where the Chants of Epiphany happen: the calendar says the Municipal Gardens, the event page says Praça do Povo at seven in the evening. Both are listed here rather than picked between.
