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Beach guide

Machico beach (Banda d’Além)

Machico’s golden beach is engineered: shipped-in sand behind breakwaters, with a Blue Flag and lifeguards through the 2026 season.

Checked against the portaria and the municipality’s own pages on July 26, 2026.

What it actually is

Surface
Imported sand
Municipality
Machico

The sand was shipped in and is held in place behind rock breakwaters.

The town Madeira was settled from, with a beach younger than most of the people on it. Walk to the far end of the bay and the original dark shingle takes over, which is the honest before-and-after.

Blue Flag awarded for 2026.

Blue Flag 2026
A dark shingle shore at Machico under heavy cloud, waves breaking along its length, a low concrete pier on stilts, a surfer carrying a board at the water’s edge and the green hill of Pico do Facho behind the town.
Machico. The imported sand is a 125-metre pocket; this is what the rest of the bay is made of.muffinn · CC BY 2.0

What the state says about it

Annex IV of Portaria n.º 204-A/2026/1 lists it as a designated bathing water, with a 2026 season running June 16, 2026 to September 27, 2026.

It appears in the “praia de banhos” column, which is how the annex records that assistance to bathers is assured.

Neither of those is our judgement. It is which column the beach appears in.

Portaria n.º 204-A/2026/1 · Diário da República, 1.ª série, n.º 84, Suplemento · Anexo IV

What it costs

Free. There is no entry charge.

All fourteen beaches, compared

Getting there

It sits in the concelho of Machico, which is how the portaria files it.

MadeiraBus publishes a direct route from Funchal to this destination: 702.

Getting around without a car

Live, right now

A camera pointed at this place. It starts on its own as you reach it.

The bay, the other imported-sand beach, and the town the island was first settled from.

Camera operated by Webcamtaxi

The cameras are hosted on YouTube, so opening this page contacts Google. Nothing else on the page does.

What we could not verify here

Carried over from the beaches page word for word, because you will meet these claims elsewhere with a confident number attached.

  • How much sand Machico actually received. Reports differ by three orders of magnitude and no official document was found.