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Crime, the sea, the air, the roads

Is Madeira safe?

Portugal publishes most of the answer as official statistics, by region, every year. This page is those numbers, each with the body that published it and the date we read it — and it says where the published record runs out.

Every figure on this page was checked on July 27, 2026.

Crime

DREM, the regional statistics office, publishes a crime rate per thousand residents each year and prints the national mean beside it. That comparison is the whole of what a rate is good for.

Recorded crime in Madeira, per 1 000 residents
Recorded crime in Madeira, per 1 000 residents
Recorded crime in Madeira, per 1 000 residentsValue
202226.9‰
202328.1‰
202426.5‰

DREM — Direção Regional de Estatística da Madeira, release of 11 November 2025.

In 2024 the regional rate was 26.5‰ against a national mean of 33‰, and 39.7‰ in the Azores. It has been below the national mean in every year DREM prints here.

Of that, 9.3‰ was crime against property and 6.3‰ crime against physical integrity. The shape of the answer for a visitor is in those two numbers: the thing most likely to be taken is a bag.

By municipality

The five DREM names in the 2024 release, per 1 000 residents.

  • Porto Santo

    41.8‰

  • Funchal

    32.8‰

  • Câmara de Lobos

    29‰

  • Porto Moniz

    27.7‰

  • Ponta do Sol

    12.8‰

Porto Santo heads the table, and that is a lesson about small denominators rather than about Porto Santo. Around five thousand people live there and the summer population is a multiple of that, while the rate divides by residents only. Read it as a caution against reading it too hard.

Violent crime, from the internal-security report

RASI 2025, presented on March 31, 2026, recorded 6630 reports of general crime in the region, down 3.6%, and 212 occurrences of violent and serious crime — one more than the year before. Nationally over the same year general crime rose 3.1% and violent crime fell 1.6%.

RASI counts reports to the security forces; DREM counts registered crime. The two totals do not match to the unit, and neither is wrong. Both are published here rather than the more flattering one.

Drugs

Two things are true at once here, and printing either alone gives a false picture.

The first: in SICAD’s population surveys the autonomous regions sit at the bottom of the national table for recent use of any drug, and Madeira is lowest of all among 15 to 34 year olds. Among 18 year olds surveyed at the Dia da Defesa Nacional the figure ran from 30% in the Algarve down to 21% in Madeira.

The synthetic-cathinone problem, at the level it is documented

The second: Portuguese reporting has documented a specific problem in Funchal with alpha-PHP, a synthetic cathinone known on the street as bloom. The hard number attached to it is this — the Polícia Judiciária’s laboratory in Madeira identified 6 substances previously unrecorded in the country within three months of opening, with the results notified onward to the European monitoring centre.

What is not here: any figure for how many people use it, any neighbourhood, and any claim about how much street crime it accounts for. Those circulate widely. None of them traces back to an official series, so none of them is on this page.

The sea

This is the part of the question with real numbers behind it, and the part where the published record is thinnest exactly where a visitor most wants it.

Drowning deaths in Portugal, per year
Drowning deaths in Portugal, per year
Drowning deaths in Portugal, per yearValue
2022157
2023155
2024121
2025142
202657

Observatório do Afogamento, Federação Portuguesa de Nadadores Salvadores. National totals; 2026 is to 31 May and provisional.

These are national. There is no published per-year drowning count for Madeira alone — the observatory reports national annual totals and breaks the regions out only as a share of each quarter. Assembling a Madeira series from press reports is exactly the sort of number this site will not invent, so what follows is the regional resolution the source actually gives.

A hollow bar is a figure the source itself flags as partial or still being counted.

Where the drownings happened

Nationally, first quarter of 2026. It corrects the instinct in both directions: the sea is not the whole risk, and it is not therefore safe.

  • Rivers17 · 47.2%
  • The sea7 · 19.4%
  • Flooded roads11.1%
  • Wells8.3%
  • Dams8.3%
  • Shelter ports2.8%
  • Domestic pools2.8%

Madeira’s share

The two periods in which the observatory broke the regions out and named Madeira. A share of a quarter is not an annual rate, so the national count for the same period is printed beside it — eleven per cent of thirty-six is four.

  • 8.7% of 23 deaths nationally in Q1 2024

    Grouped with Aveiro, Setúbal and Viana do Castelo at the same share.

  • 11.1% of 36 deaths nationally in Q1 2026

    Level with Braga, behind only Coimbra at 13.9%.

What the lifesavers say about supervision

FEPONS reports that every drowning it recorded nationally through March 2026 happened somewhere without lifeguard assistance. That is the federation’s own finding, quoted rather than paraphrased.

Separately, and from a different source: the 2026 bathing-water portaria names 23 of Madeira island’s 51 designated bathing waters as having assured lifeguard cover. More than half do not, by the state’s own accounting — including places with car parks, bars and signposts.

Portaria n.º 204-A/2026/1 · Anexo IV · 23/51

Those two paragraphs are adjacent facts, not a cause and an effect. No source links Madeira’s drownings to its unstaffed beaches, and the national breakdown above — where rivers account for nearly half the deaths — would not support the link if one tried to make it. What the two do jointly establish is worth having on its own: supervision matters, and on this island most designated bathing water has none.

The swell, and which coast

"The north coast is rougher" is the most repeated claim about swimming here and it is usually made without a number. The Capitania do Funchal publishes one every time it raises a strong-swell warning: 3.5 to 4.5 metres on the north coast against up to 2.5 metres on the south, in the same warning, at the same hour. Roughly two to one.

The authority’s own advice under those warnings is to stay off breakwaters, cliffs and beaches, and away from coastal fishing — because, in its words, the sea can reach places that look safe.

Strong-swell warnings for the archipelago in 2026 alone: Jan 16, Feb 13, Feb 24, Mar 6, Apr 7. This is a routine winter and spring condition, not an exceptional one. No incident is attached to any of these dates; they are advisories.

Sharks

The International Shark Attack File names every location with a confirmed unprovoked bite each year. For 2025 it recorded 65 worldwide, 9 of them fatal, across 15 named locations. Portugal is not among them.

That is one year, and it is where we stopped. We did not read a Portugal all-time total out of ISAF’s file, which runs from 1580; third-party aggregators list a 1979 incident off Madeira that we could not confirm against ISAF itself. One year of absence is not "never", and this page will not print "never".

The air

Three fixed monitoring stations cover the whole region, and two of them are in Funchal.

  • São JoãoFunchal · Urban traffic
  • São GonçaloFunchal · Urban background
  • SantanaSantana · Rural

Three is the number, and it is worth knowing before reading any statement about "air quality in Madeira". Outside Funchal and Santana there is no measurement to base one on.

Where a comparison does exist, it is favourable: the European Environment Agency’s city viewer ranked Funchal 4th of the roughly 300 European cities it covers.

The documented exception is the leste, the dry easterly off the Sahara that IPMA describes — up to 35 °C, humidity down to 5%, usually no more than three days, and in the months IPMA names. It is the one weather pattern here that reliably degrades both visibility and air, and the month pages carry its numbers.

QualAr, the national air-quality index, is APA’s and is published daily on a five-class scale reporting the worst pollutant at a station rather than an average. We link the official live viewer rather than reproducing today’s reading: we checked for a machine-readable feed on 27 July 2026 and found none documented, so a number copied here would go stale between rebuilds without saying so.

The water you swim in

APA classifies every designated bathing water annually; in this region DRAM does the sampling. Sixty waters across Madeira and Porto Santo for the 2026 season.

  • Excellent

    51

  • Good

    4

  • Sufficient

    3

  • Poor

    2

APA classification, 2026 season, Madeira and Porto Santo together.

The two classified poor

  • Poças do Gomes — Doca do Cavacas (Funchal)
  • Quinta do Lorde (Machico)

Named because a reader planning a swim needs them by name, and because both are places visitors are actively sent to.

A Blue Flag is a separate thing and a weaker signal than it looks: it is an application as much as an award, so a beach without one has not necessarily failed anything. The beaches page carries the full 2026 list and, more usefully, what is missing from it.

Natural hazards

The record, dated and counted. What matters for a trip is not the history but the warning system underneath it.

  • The flash floods of 20 February 2010

    47 dead, 4 missing, 250 injured and around 600 displaced when rain on the ridge came down the valleys into Funchal in a few hours.

    The 2010 death toll is reported as 45, 47 and 51 depending on whether the missing are counted and which anniversary piece you read. We publish the figure most consistently attested and name the disagreement rather than settling it ourselves.

  • The Funchal fires of August 2016

    3 dead and around 1000 people moved out of their homes. About 1666 hectares burned inside the municipality of Funchal — roughly a fifth of it — including streets in the historic centre.

  • The August 2024 fire

    Thirteen days from August 14, 2024 to August 26, 2024, starting above Ribeira Brava and reaching Câmara de Lobos, Ponta do Sol and Santana. 5104 hectares by the European fire information system’s measurement, and no deaths and no homes lost.

The number that explains the rest: 185 mm at Pico do Areeiro in a day, and 114 mm in Funchal in hours, against a Funchal annual normal of 596 mm.

What to actually check

IPMA warns this archipelago separately by coast. Its open warnings feed carries 4 Madeira area codes — north coast, south coast, Porto Santo and the maritime zone — alongside the mainland districts, on the same four-level green-to-red scale. Read from the feed on 27 July 2026.

Rockfall closures on the levadas and mountain paths are the everyday version of this, and they are handled where they belong: on the trail pages, from the official register, with the date each closure was read.

The roads

The likeliest way to be hurt on this island is in a vehicle, and the regional series has one feature that has to be explained before the chart can be read honestly.

Road deaths in Madeira
Road deaths in Madeira
Road deaths in MadeiraValue
201939
20239
20249

ANSR, Relatório Anual de Sinistralidade a 24 horas 2024. These are the only three years that report tabulates for the region.

Why 2019 looks like that

A tour coach left the road at Caniço, Santa Cruz on April 17, 2019. 29 people aboard died and 27 were injured, of 56 on board. The regional total for the whole of 2019 was 39. One event is most of the year, and a chart showing 39 falling to 9 without saying so would be telling you that Madeira’s roads were transformed in four years. They were not. Prosecutors sought 29 counts of negligent homicide in December 2019, and a memorial was inaugurated on the fifth anniversary.

"24 hours" is ANSR’s counting rule — a death within a day of the crash. Its separate 30-day series runs slightly higher. Mixing the two is the commonest error in reporting these numbers, so this page uses one and names it.

Which mode

National, not regional — ANSR does not break the region down this way. It is here because it answers a decision a visitor actually makes: the categories that are rising are the two-wheeled ones.

  • On foot74 → 69
  • In a car230 → 210
  • In a heavy vehicle8 → 3
  • On a moped26 → 18
  • On a motorcycle93 → 120
  • On a bicycle20 → 23

ANSR, national road deaths by mode, 2019 against 2024.

Where these numbers come from